Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between empowering leadership style and two types of open innovation: inbound and outbound. The intervening mechanism of employee involvement climate in these relationships is also investigated.Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses data collected using a questionnaire survey from middle and top managers working in various firms in northern India.Findings: Results reveal that empowering leadership positively affects both types of open innovation. Thus empowering leadership supports followers to seek, integrate and diffuse new ideas and knowledge to improve open innovation outcomes. Further, the mediating role of employee involvement climate is established for empowering leadership-inbound open innovation link. This suggests that an empowering leadership style creates an employee involvement climate that empowers employees and involves them in relevant decision-making which consequently enhances a firms inbound open innovation performance.Research limitations/implications: This study used a cross-sectional research design and a relatively small sample size. These limitations can affect generalizability of the findings.Originality/value: The paper contributes to leadership and open innovation literatures and provides insights into how the practitioners can use an appropriate leadership style to maximize success in the open innovation paradigm. The study is one of the first to empirically shed light on this strand of open innovation research.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop and test an integrated model to examine the relationship between managerial ties and two types of open innovation (OI). It takes into account the mediating role of realized absorptive capacity and explains how a firm’s ability to recognize the value of new information, assimilate it and apply it to commercial ends can facilitate OI.Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from 259 middle and top managers working across different sectors in the United Arab Emirates.Findings: Results obtained using structural equation modeling show that managerial ties facilitate both in-bound and out-bound OI. Results also establish the mediating role of realized absorptive capacity in these relationships.Research limitations/implications: Use of cross-sectional data as was done in this study has been criticized for being inappropriate to test causal models. Besides the findings may not be generalizable to different industries/cultures/regions.Practical implications: This study suggests that managerial ties act to support OI in firms thus giving the insight that managers should be appreciated to build ties with managers of other firms, universities and government officials. Doing so can help firms achieve better OI outcomes. Firms should arrange means of interaction of their managers with these external knowledge sources such as events and occasions where managers of different firms can interact with each other to foster strong ties among them.Originality/value: The above findings contribute theoretically to OI and managerial ties literature while providing insights for practitioners on how to succeed or avoid failure in their OI initiatives. These insights are novel and are new to the OI and managerial ties theory.