A daily diary study on ambidextrous leadership and self‐reported employee innovation

Ambidextrous leadership involves a combination of behaviours that stimulate employee exploration (‘opening behaviour’) and behaviours that facilitate exploitation of ideas (‘closing behaviour’). We hypothesized that the interaction between leaders’ daily opening and closing behaviours (i.e., ambidextrous leadership) predicts employees’ daily self‐reported innovative performance. Results based on diary data provided by 113 employees across five work days supported this hypothesis: daily self‐reported innovative performance was highest when both daily opening and closing behaviours were high. Practitioner points Findings suggest that selecting and training leaders to engage in ‘opening behaviour’, which stimulates employee exploration, result in higher daily employee innovation. Leaders should additionally be selected and trained to engage in ‘closing behaviour’, which facilitates exploitation of new ideas, in order to further boost the positive effect of ‘opening behaviour’ on daily employee innovation.