The Double-Edged Sword of Ambidextrous Leadership in Teams: A Social Information Processing Perspective

Ambidextrous leaders, who can flexibly enact and alternate between seemingly contradictory behaviors (e.g., leader opening and closing behaviors), are widely believed to help teams navigate competing demands. Drawing on social information processing theory, we provide a more comprehensive and balanced understanding of the influence of ambidextrous leadership on team effectiveness. On the one hand, ambidextrous leaders encourage members to comprehensively consider different aspects of a task by implementing contradictory behaviors, which promotes more comprehensive decision-making to achieve team effectiveness. On the other hand, switching between contradictory behaviors places a burden on team members to interpret the leader’s intentions, which leads to heightened team role stress and ultimately undermines team effectiveness. We further theorize that leader instrumentality, the strategic capacity to identify contextual cues and align means with ends, moderates these effects. We conducted a multi-wave and multi-source field study of 169 policy analysis teams in southern China to test our model. The findings from our study provide support for an adverse indirect effect of ambidextrous leadership on team effectiveness, mediated by team role stress, which can be alleviated by high leader instrumentality. In addition, we find a positive indirect effect of ambidextrous leadership on team effectiveness through decision comprehensiveness, but only under a high level of leader instrumentality. These results provide a nuanced theoretical understanding of the complex nature of ambidextrous leadership and highlight the importance of boundary conditions associated with leader capabilities, which lead to mixed outcomes.