One of the main challenges faced by leaders is positioning and empowering organizations and individuals for adaptability in an increasingly dynamic and complex environment (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018). In this context, ambidextrous leadership emerges as an essential mechanism for balancing exploration and exploitation behaviors among followers, focusing on the duality between creativity and implementation within the innovation process (Rosing et al., 2011). This doctoral dissertation focuses on this phenomenon, whose field of study is characterized by broad conceptual diversity and the need for a deeper understanding of the perspectives addressing ambidextrous leadership, its antecedents, and its moderators (Rosing et al., 2023). To contribute to this discussion, this work presents two manuscripts: one with a theoretical-conceptual focus and another empirical. The first manuscript consists of a systematic literature review that analyzes the field of studies on ambidexterity and leadership. It consolidates the main theoretical perspectives on the topic and explores how leadership is discussed within each of them. Moreover, it develops a framework that gathers the antecedents, moderators, mediators, and outcomes that have already been empirically investigated regarding ambidextrous leadership and identifies unexplored areas or issues that raise ambiguities on the topic, outlining a future research agenda. The second manuscript presents the results of two empirical studies, based on questionnaires answered by 368 managers and 200 subordinates from three Brazilian companies. Its objective was to investigate the influence of learning and avoidance goal orientation on ambidextrous leadership and to examine the moderating role of job complexity in the relationship between ambidextrous leadership, ambidextrous behavior, and the follower s innovative performance. Although the hypotheses related to learning and avoidance goal orientation as antecedents of ambidextrous leadership were not confirmed, several findings were observed that may be explored in future research. The second study, however, statistically confirmed the moderating and antecedent role of job complexity in the relationship between ambidextrous leadership and the follower s ambidextrous behavior. Overall, the thesis results contribute in an original way to the advancement of knowledge on ambidextrous leadership.