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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship among CEO transformational leadership, innovation climate and organizational innovation through exploration and exploitation.

A questionnaire, designed as a self-reported survey, was distributed to individuals working in teams in US-based corporations, with a collected sample size of 215 organizations.

Results show that CEO transformational leadership has a direct positive effect on organizational innovation and an indirect effect through innovation climate. CEO leadership is more impactful for exploitation, compared to innovation climate, which has more influence on exploration.

This study is the first to integrate CEO transformational leadership and innovation climate with exploration and exploitation outcomes. A research limitation is that there is a higher percentage of female than male respondents and a lower of percentage of female CEOs in this study. A further limitation is self-report which can lead to common method bias.

The close connection among CEO transformational leadership, innovation climate and organizational innovation suggests that evaluating, supporting and training CEO transformational leadership becomes a vital activity for boards, investors and managers. If management wants to increase exploration, they should pay particular attention to creating a climate that is supportive of innovation. Organizations should recruit and train CEOs for transformational leadership and regularly assess climate to ensure innovation results.

The main contribution of this study is highlighting the role of innovation climate as a mediator between CEO transformational leadership and the outcome of organizational innovation which is measured by exploration and exploitation activities.

This study explores the impact of gender on team leadership style and how it impacts team innovation outcomes using the ambidexterity theory (opening and closing behaviors) of leadership for innovation.

A total of 215 self-report surveys of team members were collected for hypothesis testing. This study tests whether team leader gender moderates the relationship between ambidextrous team leadership and team innovation.

Female team leaders are engaged in less opening behaviors of ideation, risk-taking and exploration than their male counterparts. Additionally, when female leaders engaged in closing behaviors, which include assigning roles and timelines, they had less impact than the closing behaviors of their male colleagues. Female team leaders were perceived as less effective in leading innovation than males.

This study examines the influence of gender on team leadership and innovation outcomes. There are drawbacks of cross-sectional data, sample selection issues and potential problems of percept–percept relationships.

These findings suggest that female team leads may need greater organizational support and organizational senior leadership support to take risks (opening behavior) to produce greater team innovation and increase leader visibility.

Society can achieve even greater innovation outcomes by understanding and addressing the unique obstacles woman team leaders face with innovation. Organizations can benefit from innovation and resilience by supporting women team leaders in their diverse delivery of innovation.

This is the first study to look at the influence of gender and leadership on team innovation outcomes. Ambidextrous leadership theory provides insights into the specific challenges woman team leaders experience; however, so far no research has addressed the innovation outcome challenges female team leaders encounter. Since innovation and leadership can be a key component of visibility, compensation and promotion, it is necessary to investigate the challenges female team leads face in the innovation process.