Ambidextrous leaders helping newcomers get on board: Achieving adjustment and proaction through distinct pathways

As they socialize into a new workplace, newcomers must pursue role adjustment and role innovation simultaneously. To facilitate their socialization, the newcomer literature must explain how organizational insiders, such as an immediate supervisor, can support newcomers in accomplishing both purposes. Drawing on the social information processing perspective, this study focuses on ambidextrous leadership, which consists of two seemingly opposite yet potentially complementary behaviors—opening and closing leadership—and investigates their interaction effect on newcomer task performance and innovative behavior. A field study based on 377 newcomers and their immediate supervisors showed that opening leadership and closing leadership exhibited a mutually strengthening interaction effect on newcomer innovation through individual creative self-efficacy. Meanwhile, the interaction effect between opening leadership and closing leadership on individual task performance was transmitted through newcomers’ role clarity. Finally, we discussed the implications of our study, accordingly.