Driving innovation in health care: exploring the impact of ambidextrous leadership on creative performance among frontline health professionals in Norway

Abstract

Abstract Background In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on enhancing frontline health professionals’ ability to think and act innovatively, also known as their creative performance. However, previous research has had two limitations. First, only a few leadership styles and their associations with this capability have been examined. Second, there has been a lack of research on identifying potential process mediators and examining their role in the relationship between leadership styles and the professionals’ capability. To address this knowledge gap, our study investigates the impact of ambidextrous leadership, a relatively new leadership style, on frontline health professionals’ creative performance. Additionally, we explore whether frontline health professionals’ learning orientation (an individual factor) and relationship learning (an organizational factor) act as process mediators in this association. No previous research has focused on these relationships. Thus, the study offers a unique contribution to health services research. Methods This is a cross-sectional study with a convenience sample of N = 258 health professionals in nine Norwegian municipalities. The results of this study were analyzed using PLS-SEM with SmartPLS 3 software. The study examined both direct and indirect relationships through bootstrapping. Results The results reveal a positive link between health professionals’ creative performance and ambidextrous leadership $$ (\beta $$ = 0.224). Both relationship learning and learning orientation were found to operate as complementary process-mediating factors between health professionals’ creative performance and ambidextrous leadership. The strength of the two individual relationships that constitute the process-mediating factors indicates that ambidextrous leadership has a stronger impact on relationship learning than on learning orientation $$ (\beta $$ = 0.504 versus $$ \beta $$ = 0.276). However, when we examined the individual associations between the two factors and creative performance, the strength of the relationships was quite different. The findings reveal that learning orientation is significantly more positively associated with creative performance than relationship learning $$ (\beta $$ = 0.302 versus $$ \beta $$ = 0.163). Ambidextrous leadership, learning orientation, and relationship learning explain 26% (R2 = 0.262) of the variance in professionals’ creative performance. Conclusions This study suggests that ambidextrous leadership can facilitate health professionals’ creative performance directly and indirectly through the two process-mediating factors: relationship learning and learning orientation. Thus, a practical implication is the importance for health service organizations of clear awareness of the numerous advantages of having leaders who actively practice an ambidextrous leadership style.