The double-edged sword of ambidextrous leadership for leaders themselves: A conservation of resources perspective

BACKGROUND: Many recent studies have proposed that leadership behaviors are attached to social exchange processes that influence not only their followers but also leaders themselves. Existing research has not adequately addressed how ambidextrous leadership affects the leaders themselves. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to investigate the extent to which ambidextrous leadership has benefits and costs for leaders’ work engagement. Additionally, it attempts to explore the moderating role of leaders’ emotional intelligence in the conceptual model. METHODS: Data were collected from a two-phase online survey of 153 managers in China. We tested our conceptual model using path analysis and bootstrapping methods based on Mplus. RESULTS: Results show that ambidextrous leadership is positively associated with leaders’ positive affect. Moreover, ambidextrous leadership has a positive indirect effect on leaders’ work engagement through positive affect. However, ambidextrous leadership also has devastating effects on leaders’ work engagement through ego depletion for leaders with low levels of emotional intelligence. CONCLUSIONS: Drawing on COR theory, we demonstrate that ambidextrous leadership can act as a double-edged sword for leaders. Specifically, ambidextrous leadership may cause different behavioral responses (promoting vs. inhibiting work engagement) via two distinct pathways (positive affect vs. ego depletion). Meanwhile, the extent to which this dark side appears depends on the characteristics of the manager. By integrating both the negative and positive sides of ambidextrous leadership, we hope the present paper sparks future research on the impact of leaders on themselves.