Abstract:

Creativity has been agreed to be a contributor towards inter alia performance, innovative performance, competiveness, and entrepreneurship at the individual, team, organizational, and even cultural and societal level (a systems view). The creativity phenomenon might be considered as either an outcome (novel and useful on the basis of originality, fluency, and flexibility) or a process (cognitive and behavioural). Moreover, creativity is encompassed in ambidextrous leadership in terms of creative and divergent thinking as well as leader’s exploitation and exploration behaviour. The aim of the paper is to contribute to develop a conceptual framework with regard to the relationships between creativity, ambidextrous leadership and innovative performance incorporating a multi-level perspective. The aim of the paper has been achieved through critical literature studies. The key findings constitute the following propositions: (1) Individual, team, and organizational creativity with their antecedents are positively associated with subjective and objective innovative performance as well as this relationship is mediated with both cognitive divergence/convergence and exploration/exploitation behaviour; (2) Ambidextrous leadership permeates creativity at every methodological level (individual, team, and organizational) and is reflected with divergent and convergent thinking styles in terms of a process, an outcome, and context; (3) Cognitive divergence is positively associated with creativity that in turn leads to exploration behaviour; (4) Cognitive convergence is positively associated with rigidity that in turn leads to exploitation behaviour; (5) Leaders’ temporal flexibility moderates the associations between cognitive divergence and creativity as well as cognitive convergence and rigidity respectively; (6) Exploration behaviour is positively associated with both subjective and objective innovative performance; (7) Exploitation behaviour moderates the relationship between exploration behaviour and subjective & objective innovative performance; (8) Subjective innovative performance might moderate the relationship between exploration behaviour and objective innovative performance.