Innovation in top management teams: Minority dissent,transformational leadership,and radical innovations

Research among lower level teams suggests that minority dissent stimulates team innovation. We consider the role of CEO transformational leadership in the dissent–innovation relation and study this in Top Management Teams (TMTs). We propose that transformational leaders create a psychologically safe team climate, in which dissenting opinions are used effectively to create radical innovations. Members of 36 TMTs (N = 196) completed a questionnaire to assess minority dissent, transformational leadership, and participative safety. CEOs provided data about the innovations implemented by the team. Results showed that minority dissent was positively related to the number of innovations implemented by TMTs. However, only under high levels of transformational leadership were these innovations radical. It was further found that transformational leadership had this effect because it was positively associated with participative safety. These results indicate that minorities stimulate innovativeness and that through transformational leadership CEOs can create a climate in which minority input is transformed into radical innovations. Implications for TMT performance and team innovation are discussed.     

Individual ambidexterity: the duality of exploration and exploitation and its relationship with innovative performance

Organizational ambidexterity has been established as an important antecedent of organizational innovation and performance. Recently, researchers have started to argue that ambidexterity is not only essential at the organizational, but also at the individual level. Thus, to be innovative, individuals need to engage in both explorative and exploitative behaviours. However, questions remain regarding the optimal balance of explorative and exploitative behaviours and how ambidexterity can be operationalized. At the organizational level, most empirical research utilized either the difference between, or the product of, exploration and exploitation. In this article, we criticize these approaches on conceptual and methodological grounds and argue for an alternative operationalization of ambidexterity: polynomial regression and response surface methodology. In two diary studies with daily and weekly data, we demonstrate the advantages of this approach. We discuss implications for ambidexterity research and innovation practice.