Ambidextrous Leaders Helping Newcomers Getting on Board: How to Achieve Adjustment and Proaction?

Abstract

In the modern workplace, newcomers tend to achieve both role adjustment and role innovation simultaneously. Thus, a pressing need exists for the newcomer literature to understand how organizational insiders, such as immediate supervisor, can support newcomers to accomplish both purposes simultaneously. Drawing on the social information processing perspective, this study focuses on ambidextrous leadership, which contains two seemingly opposite yet potentially complementary behaviors—opening and closing leadership—and investigates their interaction effect upon newcomer task performance and innovative behavior. A field study based on 377 newcomers and their direct supervisors revealed that opening leadership and closing leadership exhibited a mutually strengthening interaction effect on newcomer innovation by individual creative self-efficacy. Conversely, the interaction effect between opening leadership and closing leadership on individual task performance was transmitted through role clarity. Furthermore, we discussed implications from the study, accordingly.