How Does Ambidextrous Leadership Relate to Followers’ Career Success？ A Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract

With the rapid development of economy and technology, the organizations are facing the increasingly complex living environment, and there are a series of contradictions and conflicts between flexibility and control, between command and authorization, and between exploration and stability on the management in the internal organizations. And how to resolve these conflicts has become one of current missions of the organizations. For the organizational leaders, single leadership style cannot interpret their behavior effectively, and the presentation of ambidextrous leadership can solute the conflict of the two leadership styles that seem mutually opposing and incompatible. The so-called ambidextrous leadership is a new type of leadership that consists of two different forms of leadership behaviors and is balanced and complementary by both to cope with environmental changes. Although ambidextrous leadership is more common than single leadership, there is less research about the influence of ambidextrous leadership on employees’ career success. In addition, more and more employees get higher income and other material income, however, they have not got career success, and the employees’ career success is closely related to their own development, happiness and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the relationship between ambidextrous leadership and employees’ career success. Besides focusing on the direct relationship between ambidextrous leadership and career success, this paper also conducts a further study of the specific mechanism of internal interaction between ambidextrous leadership and career success. In particular, the mediating role of supervisor identification is explored based on social identity theory, and the moderating role of proactive personality is explored based on proactive personality theory. In this paper, the questionnaires were distributed and collected by field survey. The subjects were involved in leaders and employees who come from different regions and different industries, and finally we received 338 samples （employee-direct supervisor pairs）. The results of the data analysis show that: （1） ambidextrous leadership has a significant effect on employees’ career success; （2） the study of mediating effect shows that the impact of ambidextrous leadership on employees’ career success is mainly through the employees’ identification of supervisor; （3） the study of moderated effect indicates that proactive personality plays a negative role in moderating the relationship between ambidextrous leadership and supervisor identification, the lower level of proactive personality leads to the stronger influence of ambidextrous leadership on supervisor identification; （4） a moderated mediation model finds that the above mediating effect is influenced by proactive personality, namely employees with lower proactive personality result in the stronger influence of ambidextrous leadership on supervisor identification, and finally the stronger effect of employees’ career success. The above conclusions have some significance for both theory and practice. Specially, in theoretical aspect, it enriches the theoretical research of ambidextrous leadership in cross-cultural context, and further explains the impact results of ambidextrous leadership, to strengthen the guiding significance of ambidextrous leadership for practice; the results show that each measurement scale has a good reliability, which provides a reference for the follow-up study in the choice of variable measurement scale. In practice, it stimulates the maximum effectiveness of ambidextrous leadership, so as to promote employees’ career success; to promote subordinates’ career success should not only focus on the creation of ambidextrous leaders, but also need to focus on the level of subordinates’ supervisor identification, to achieve better results by two-pronged approach; managers need to set different management strategies for subordinates at different levels of proactive personality.