Given a connected graph G with adjacency matrix A(G) and distance matrix D(G), its generalized adjacency-distance matrix is defined as \(S_{\alpha }(G)=\alpha D(G)+(1-\alpha )A(G)\) for \(\alpha \in [0,1]\) . We refer to the largest eigenvalue of \(S_\alpha (G)\) as the \(S_\alpha \) -spectral radius of G. This paper presents some local graft transformations which change the \(S_\alpha \) -spectral radius of graphs. Using these transformations, we characterize the extremal graphs with maximum \(S_\alpha \) -spectral radius in all n-vertex connected graphs with given clique number or maximum degree. Additionally, we also characterize the extremal graph with minimum \(S_\alpha \) -spectral radius among the most of bicyclic graphs with n vertices.