Ambidextrous Leadership and Job Crafting: The Mediating Role of Entrepreneurial Orientation and Moderating Role of Organizational Social Exchange

The unpredictability and uncertainty of working conditions have necessitated mechanisms of flexibility and change in current applications of job design theory. Organizations should be able to use their existing capabilities and at the same time acquire new and basic capabilities; In fact, they become ambidextrous. For organizations to become ambidextrous, they need leaders with ambidextrous characteristics who manage changes and simultaneously improve creativity and innovation. In this way, the organizations become adaptable and explorative to realize their mission. The organization's entrepreneurial orientation empowers the workforce and encourages them to redesign their duties actively. On the other hand, social exchanges in organizations highlight the socio-emotional aspect of job relationships, such as feelings and attention.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

One of the solutions to provide an outstanding performance is to be explorative and innovative simultaneously with the aid of the organization's structure and design, its human resources, and leadership styles. These issues can be incorporated into a distinct concept called entrepreneurial orientation. Previous research showed that ambidextrous leadership increases the entrepreneurial orientation of an organization. In an organization with high-quality social exchanges, employees are more capable of redesigning their work activities, and thus, the social exchange may moderate the effect of ambidextrous leadership on job crafting.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating role of entrepreneurial orientation and the moderating role of organizational social exchange for ambidextrous leadership-job crafting association. The research method was descriptive-correlational. The statistical population was comprised of active manufacturing companies located in the industrial towns of Rasht, Lahijan, and Bandar Anzali, among which 121 companies were sampled using the convenience method. The needed data was gathered by distributing questionnaires in the form of an in-person survey. Obtained data were analyzed in SmartPls v.2 and Spss v.28 to test the research hypotheses.

The results of structural equation modeling indicated that entrepreneurial orientation fully mediated the effect of ambidextrous leadership on job crafting. The results of hierarchical regression analysis confirmed the moderating role of social exchange. In other words, the interactional effect of ambidextrous leadership and social exchange and job crafting was also statistically significant.

CONCLUSIONS & SUGGESTIONS:

Job redesign in the form of job crafting is like a white canvas on which employees can determine their work content to have meaningful jobs. Therefore, an organization of high entrepreneurial orientation provides an environment to foster such proactive and creative behaviors in line with job crafting. Ambidextrous leaders create a synergy between explorative and exploitative activities to facilitate entrepreneurial orientation, which in turn leads to job crafting. In an organization of having high-quality social exchanges, employees are more committed to the organization and tend to engage in entrepreneurial behaviors and changes. Therefore, job crafting can be a more likely process for ambidextrous leaders of an organization that has entrepreneurial orientation and high-quality social exchanges.