Investigating the Role of Leadership and Behavioral Intergration : An Ambidextrous Perspective of Project Teams

Abstract

This study intends to examine the impact of transactional and transformational leadership on team members' ambidexterity, which involves mediation of team behavioral integration and moderation of environmental dynamism. The population of this study was software projects in Pakistan. Simple random sampling technique was applied to choose the software houses at the first level. After the extraction of the target software houses from the list, a convenience sampling technique was used on the second level to collect the respondents' data from project team members. After the data collection, specific statistical analysis techniques were applied to investigate the direct, mediated and moderated relationship between the variables of interest. The results drawn from this study are expected to increase the understanding of aspects of project team members' ambidexterity in software industry and to clarify the role of behavioral integration and environmental dynamism with predictors, i.e., transformational leadership and transactional leadership, and ambidextrous leadership. We expect this study will benefit the project teams in software industry who are in search of continuous improvements and up-gradation and require high levels of team integration with the risks involved in the industry because the role of a leader is crucial when setting up goals for their members. This study also elaborated the role of a project manager as a leader and its impact on team members' ambidexterity. The findings indicated that transformational and transactional leadership plays a role in improving the team member’s ambidexterity. Furthermore, ambidextrous leadership has greater impact on innovation; hence improve the team member’s ambidexterity.