Abstract: In a complex and competitive market environment, organizations are faced with a variety of contradictory demands. Enterprises often fall into the dilemma of exploration and exploitation or pursuing short-term interests and long-term goals. Leaders need to be flexible and adaptive, and to take ‘both-and' leader behaviors. Therefore, ambidextrous leadership, which is considered as effective leader behavior, has attracted increasing attention from scholars. Ambidextrous leadership refers to a leader's ability to foster exploitation and exploration in followers while flexibly switching between opening and closing leader behaviors. Ambidextrous leadership plays an important role in promoting individual ambidexterity and team innovation and helping organizations deal with contradictory goals.
Previous studies have documented the positive effect of ambidextrous leadership on subordinates, such as self-efficacy, work passion, task performance and innovation. However, recent research indicates the potentially detrimental effects of ambidextrous leadership. For example, subordinates experience cognitive strain when leaders display inconsistent behaviors. This research integrates the contradictory viewpoints and proposes a dual-process model based on the conservation of resource theory. Specifically, we deduce that, on the one hand, ambidextrous leadership elicits affective commitment to supervisor in followers, which promotes followers' work engagement; on the other hand, ambidextrous leadership increases followers' job stress, which in turn may weaken followers' work engagement. Moreover, as a personal characteristic, employee's power distance could moderate the dual process of ambidextrous leadership.
Based on a two-stage questionnaire survey of 218 employees, the results of path analysis supported our hypotheses. The results showed that ambidextrous leadership could improve employees' work engagement by enhancing affective commitment to supervisor while weakening employees' work engagement by increasing job stress. Moreover, employees' power distance moderated the positive or negative effect of ambidextrous leadership. In particular, the positive relationship between ambidextrous leadership and affective commitment to leaders is stronger when employees have a high level of power distance. Ambidextrous leadership is more likely to induce job stress for employees who are low in power distance.
Our study investigated both benefits and drawbacks of ambidextrous leadership, which could advance our understanding of the double-edged sword effect of ambidextrous leadership more comprehensively. Moreover, by revealing the mediating role of affective commitment to supervisor and job stress and the moderating role of power distance, this study reveals the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions of the relationship between ambidextrous leadership and employee work engagement. Furthermore, our findings also provide implications for managerial practice. Managers need to pay attention to subordinates' psychological reactions and attitudes and provide more resource support to relieve the tension or stress of employees when engaging in ambidextrous leadership. In addition, leaders should pay attention to the individual differences of employees. Leaders may strengthen ambidexterity for employees who are in high power distance to amplify the positive effects of ambidextrous leadership. In contrast, ambidextrous leadership leaders should convey clear goals and communicate with employees with low power distance to relieve the negative effects of ambidextrous leadership.

Key words: ambidextrous leadership, affective commitment to supervisor, job stress, work engagement, power distance

摘要： 本研究基于资源保存理论,探讨了双元领导对下属工作投入的双刃剑效应。对218位员工的两阶段调查数据进行路径分析,结果表明：双元领导一方面通过增加下属对领导的情感承诺,提升员工工作投入,另一方面通过增强员工的工作压力,降低员工工作投入。对高权力距离的员工而言,双元领导通过增强领导情感承诺对员工工作投入产生更强的积极影响;对于低权力距离的员工而言,双元领导通过增加工作压力对员工工作投入产生更强的消极影响。

关键词: 双元领导, 领导情感承诺, 工作压力, 工作投入, 权力距离