Linking psychological capital to ambidexterity: Does leadership perception matter?

Abstract

In today's competitive business environment, positive organizational change is any change that is essential for an organization, considering aspects of workers' psychological inputs, ambidexterity, individual behavior, and performance that may be affected by the change. The volatility and ambiguity characterizing modern organizations require leaders to foster employees' psychological capital (PsyCap). The leaders should decide on how to allocate their time between activities serving either incremental or revolutionary change. Using a sample of 181 white-collar employees working in the chemicals sector, the relationship between PsyCap, self-efficacy, hope, resilience and optimism- and contextual ambidexterity was examined. In that regard, the moderation effect of transformational leadership on the hypothesized relationship was also investigated. Our results support the hypotheses on the relationship between PsyCap and all its components and contextual ambidexterity. Furthermore, the statistical analyses provide supporting evidence of transformational leadership's moderation effect on the relationship between PsyCap and contextual ambidexterity. These findings somehow echo the idea that leadership development is essential to global competitiveness and organizational sustainability and that positive workers may be essential constituent in positive organizational change. Future research needs to continue to explore the nomological network of psychological capital, and contextual ambidexterity. © 2021 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.