How do ambidextrous leadership and self-efficacy influence employees' enterprise system use: an empirical study of customer relationship management system context

Based on leadership and self-efficacy theories, this study investigates how team-level ambidextrous leadership influences employees' enterprise system (ES) use via their self-efficacy.

This study collected data from a cross-sectional survey including 218 employees working in 56 workgroups in a Chinese financial institution. The authors used a cross-level mediation analysis to test the research model.

The authors find that ambidextrous leadership influences employees' creative self-efficacy and performance self-efficacy and further improves employees' ES use. Moreover, creative self-efficacy mediates the relationship between ambidextrous leadership and explorative use, whereas performance self-efficacy mediates the relationship between ambidextrous leadership and both explorative and exploitative use.

This study first examines the relationships among ambidextrous leadership, self-efficacy and employees' ES use by developing a cross-level model. Furthermore, by considering ambidextrous leadership as an important team-level factor, this study extends a deeper understanding of ambidexterity theory of leadership in the ES context. In addition, our study extends self-efficacy theory by examining the mediating roles of the two types of self-efficacy (i.e. performance self-efficacy and creative self-efficacy) on ambidextrous leadership–ES use relationship.