Driving Innovation Capability with Disruptive Leadership and Complementary Capabilities

This research explores the role of disruptive leadership in fostering innovation capability in technology-oriented organizations, with a particular focus on the moderating effects of employee agency and autonomy and temporal dynamics. The data was collected from 50 organizations having high and low innovation capability. The fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (FsQCA), indicated that multiple configurations that lead to high innovation capability, highlighting how combinations of disruptive leadership behaviours, such as visionary thinking, risk-taking, and challenging traditional systems, interact with contextual moderators to enable organizational innovation. Specifically, it finds that the absence of rapid pivoting from failures can be compensated by high employee agency and autonomy, while temporal dynamics align with visionary leadership to foster innovation. The research advances the capabilities-based view (CBV) by introducing the concept of complementarity effects, demonstrating that innovation capability emerges not from individual capabilities in isolation but from their synergistic interactions. By integrating leadership behaviors as capabilities with organizational resources, this study contributes to a more dynamic and relational understanding of how capabilities complement one another to sustain innovation.