&#x0201c;Shouldering the Vision and Vigilance&#x0201d;: The Impact of Visionary-Vigilant Ambidextrous Leadership on Balanced Innovation

Lin Chen; Zhao Chen; Zhou Jinlai; Gao Zhonghua

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240614

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2024, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (6) : 1422-1432. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240614

Social，Personality & Organizational Psychology

“Shouldering the Vision and Vigilance”: The Impact of Visionary-Vigilant Ambidextrous Leadership on Balanced Innovation

Lin Chen¹, Zhao Chen¹, Zhou Jinlai¹, Gao Zhonghua²

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Abstract

Today’s world is experiencing the greatest changes in a century. Management practitioners are generally struggling with the difficult choice of “change or stay the same”. We believe that in the era of digital economy, where new technologies emerge in endlessly and product iteration deepens, organizations should not only carry out radical innovation but also consider incremental innovation. Therefore, we argue that balanced innovation, which balances both radical innovation and incremental innovation, is of great significance in the business activities of enterprises. However, previous studies on balanced innovation usually stay at the organizational level and fail to analyze the micro-psychological mechanism of balanced innovation at the individual level, which may not seem to take effect immediately, but it is still equally important. At the same time, analyzing the impact of a single leadership on balanced innovation often has limitations, because a single leadership may focus on different aspects of innovation activities. Therefore, we focus on two types of complementary change-oriented leadership, visionary leadership and vigilant leadership, and explore the psychological mechanism of the joint effect of the two types of leadership on the subordinate’s balanced innovation behavior.
Based on previous studies depicting the theoretical connotations of visionary leadership and vigilant leadership, we argue that the two have complementary relationships in terms of goals and behavioral logic. Referring to the existing definition of ambidextrous leadership, we combine the complementary relationship between visionary leadership and vigilant leadership to propose a visionary-vigilant ambidextrous leadership composed of the two. Furthermore, based on the social information processing theory, we take subordinates’ paradoxical mindset as the mediator and the environmental dynamics as the moderator to study the impact mechanism of visionary-vigilant ambidextrous leadership on subordinates’ balanced innovation. We tested our hypothesis by conducting a two-stage study with 301 participants in 53 teams. Data were collected using a visionary scale, a vigilant leadership scale, a paradoxical mindset scale, an environmental dynamics scale, a radical innovation scale, and an incremental innovation scale. The mechanism is analyzed by using the two-level structure equation model.
The results show that: (1) Visionary-vigilant ambidextrous leadership has a positive effect on subordinates’ balanced innovation. (2) Subordinates’ paradoxical mindset plays a mediating role in the process of visionary-vigilant ambidextrous leadership influencing balanced innovation. (3) Environmental dynamics plays a moderating role in the process of visionary-vigilant ambidextrous leadership influencing subordinates’ paradox mindset. The higher the environment dynamics, the stronger the positive effect of visionary-vigilant ambidextrous leadership on subordinates’ paradoxical mindset is. (4) Environmental dynamics also play a moderating role in the mediation process of visionary-vigilant ambidextrous leadership influencing balanced innovation through the paradoxical mindset.
The study makes important contributions. First, we revealed the mechanism of the joint influence of multiple leadership on subordinate balanced innovation, which fills the gap in existing research that focuses on the relationship between balanced innovation and single leadership. Second, based on the social information processing theory, we achieved a micro psychological portrayal of the trickle-down process in which leaders’ diversified change behaviors affect subordinates’ balanced innovation, making up for the lack of individual psychology in previous studies in the field of balanced innovation. Finally, we explored the interaction between vigilant leadership and other leadership, enriched and developed the theoretical construction of vigilant leadership. Vigilant leadership, as a new type of leadership proposed in recent years, has received little research attention. Previous studies have suggested that there may be complementary theoretical relationships between this type of leadership and other leadership, and have called for further research to explore this possibility. One contribution of this study is its response to existing studies. The conclusion of this paper can also provide action directions for organizational leaders to lead subordinates to perform balanced innovation, and guide managers to adopt a ambidextrous leadership that balances vision and vigilance when appropriate.

Key words

visionary leadership / vigilant leadership / balanced innovation / ambidextrous leadership / social information processing theory

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Lin Chen, Zhao Chen, Zhou Jinlai, Gao Zhonghua. “Shouldering the Vision and Vigilance”: The Impact of Visionary-Vigilant Ambidextrous Leadership on Balanced Innovation[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2024, 47(6): 1422-1432 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240614

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