Curious, unconventional and creative: CEO openness and innovation ambidexterity

ABSTRACT

Despite a growing number of research on the impact of open CEOs on organisational outcomes, their role in shaping corporate innovation strategies has received little scholarly attention. This paper uses a large sample of panel data from Chinese knowledge-intensive high-tech listed companies to investigate how CEOs affect innovation ambidexterity when they possess open tendencies, and how managerial discretion, influenced by firm and environment-level factors, affects such relationship. The results show that open CEOs exhibit attributes of broad interests, divergent thinking, and creativity that positively affect innovation ambidexterity, and this relationship tends to be stronger when working context give them greater managerial discretion. Specifically, state ownership has a negative moderating effect, while the intensity of market competition enhances the positive relationship between CEO openness and innovation ambidexterity, and simultaneously mitigates the negative effect of state ownership. By examining the impact of this important CEO personality trait on corporate innovation strategies, we extend the literature on the upper echelon theory (UET) and ambidextrous innovation (AI), which is also a response to emphasising that more attention should be paid to the micro-foundation of organisational innovation in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• CEO openness
• innovation ambidexterity
• state ownership
• competitive intensity

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manqing Tan

Manqing Tan is a PhD candidate of the Economics and Management School at Wuhan University. Her research interests are mainly innovation management and strategy management.

Qinghua Xia

Qinghua Xia is a Professor of the Economics and Management School at Wuhan University. Her current research is focused on S&T policy, entrepreneurship and innovation management.