Ambidextrous Leadership, Individual Ambidexterity, and Workforce Agility at Immigration Checkpoints

Farid Asyam Nur Alam; Suparto Wijoyo; Fendy Suhariadi

doi:10.59261/inkubis.v8i3.415

Authors

Farid Asyam Nur Alam Universitas Airlangga
Suparto Wijoyo Universitas Airlangga
Fendy Suhariadi Universitas Airlangga

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59261/inkubis.v8i3.415

Keywords:

ambidextrous leadership, individual ambidexterity, workforce agility, environmental dynamism, Indonesian immigration

Abstract

Background: Public organizations increasingly face simultaneous demands for procedural reliability and rapid adaptation under digital transformation and environmental volatility. At high-dynamism immigration checkpoints, this tension is especially acute because officers must comply with strict border-control procedures while responding to evolving service and security challenges.

Objective: This study examines how ambidextrous leadership drives workforce agility through the mediating mechanism of individual ambidexterity among immigration officers, and whether environmental dynamism moderates this pathway.

Methods: A quantitative cross-sectional survey of 450 officers at TPI Soekarno-Hatta was analyzed using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 4 with a disjoint two-stage moderated mediation approach and 5,000 bootstrap resamples.

Results: Ambidextrous leadership significantly predicts individual ambidexterity, which significantly predicts workforce agility. Individual ambidexterity partially mediates the leadership–agility relationship, accounting for 48.3% of the total effect. Environmental dynamism does not significantly moderate the individual ambidexterity–agility path. This non-moderation is interpreted cautiously as being consistent with a proposed institutional ambidexterity trap in which formal demands for adaptability coexist with institutional arrangements that constrain exploratory behavior. The single-site, cross-sectional design limits causal inference and generalizability.

Conclusion: The findings support a leadership–individual ambidexterity–workforce agility pathway in frontline public service and identify a testable institutional boundary condition for future multi-site research on bureaucratic ambidexterity.

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