Social Psychology of Organizations

Organizational ambidexterity refers to the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit—to compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and to also compete in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed. In the past 15 years there has been an explosion of interest and research on this topic. We briefly review the current state of the research, highlighting what we know and don't know about the topic. We close with a point of view on promising areas for ongoing research.

Organizational Ambidexterity: Past, Present, and Future

Organizational ambidexterity refers to the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit--to compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and to also compete in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed. In the past 15 years there has been an explosion of interest and research on this topic. We briefly review the current state of the research, highlighting what we know and don't know about the topic. We close with a point of view on promising areas for ongoing research.

Organizational Ambidexterity: Past, Present and Future

Understanding the small business sector

textPrior studies have emphasized that structural attributes are crucial to simultaneously pursuing exploration and exploitation, yet our understanding of antecedents of ambidexterity is still limited. Structural differentiation can help ambidextrous organizations to maintain multiple inconsistent and conflicting demands; however, differentiated exploratory and exploitative activities need to mobilized, coordinated, integrated, and applied. Based on this idea, we delineate formal and informal senior team integration mechanisms (i.e. contingency rewards and social integration) and formal and informal organizational integration mechanisms (i.e. cross-functional interfaces and connectedness) and examine how they mediate the relationship between structural differentiation and ambidexterity. Overall, our findings suggest that the previously asserted direct effect of structural differentiation on ambidexterity operates through informal senior team (i.e. senior team social integration) and formal organizational (i.e. cross-functional interfaces) integration mechanisms. Through this richer explanation and empirical assessment, we contribute to a greater clarity and better understanding of how organizations may effectively pursue exploration and exploitation simultaneously to achieve ambidexterity.

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Structural Differentiation and Ambidexterity: The Mediating Role of Integration Mechanisms

Recent research indicates that interorganizational partnerships represent a potentially important resource for the development of ambidexterity. However, little is known about how a firm’s ambidext...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1476127010387409

Creating ambidexterity by integrating and balancing structurally separate interorganizational partnerships

Although research on organizational ambidexterity has exploded in the past several years, the determinants of individual-level ambidexterity have received little scholarly attention. This is surprising given that management scholars increasingly highlight the benefits of combining explorative and exploitative activities in individual employees’ work roles. Using data collected by a two-wave survey of 638 employees nested in 173 groups across 34 organizations, our research demonstrates that both psychological factors and leadership predict employees’ ambidextrous behaviour. Our results demonstrate that general self-efficacy positively predicts ambidextrous behaviour through learning orientation. In addition, we show that employees exhibit higher ambidexterity when their group managers demonstrate paradoxical leadership; that is, a leadership style that couples strong managerial support with high performance expectations. Paradoxical leadership also moderates the relationship between learning orientation and individual ambidexterity such that employees’ ambidextrous behaviour is highest when paradoxical leadership and employee learning orientation are simultaneously at high levels.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/JOMS_JOMS12192.pdf?abstractid=2818067&mirid=5

The Social-Cognitive Underpinnings of Employees' Ambidextrous Behaviour and the Supportive Role of Group Managers' Leadership

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/13472.pdf

Alliance management capability and firm performance: : Using resource-based theory to look inside the process black box

This study focuses on a challenge faced by multinational corporations: how to enhance knowledge sharing across geographical and functional boundaries given the multifaceted nature of knowledge. The article demonstrates how a multinational company can create the means and spaces necessary to achieve effective knowledge sharing and learning by highlighting a viable information system that supports social networking. It also offers a virtual team structure that draws upon and strengthens employees’ social ties, which can boost organization-wide management of fine-grained knowledge. This combined approach mitigates the negative effects of physical and organizational distance on the availability of support and information. The present study contributes to organizational learning and knowledge-sharing discussions by shedding light on how virtual teams that function as knowledge activists can enhance internal knowledge sharing in globally dispersed organizations.

Knowledge sharing through virtual teams across borders and boundaries

Although prior research generally holds that role clarity is affected by both individual characteristics and organizational contexts, current conceptual or empirical models do not reflect the multilevel nature of these antecedents. A more complete understanding of how role clarity emanates from different organizational levels is necessary to help prevent poor job performance and other harmful consequences of ambiguous role expectations. To address this, I begin this research by investigating the effects of internal work locus of control, general self-efficacy, and leader�member exchange on role clarity. With respect to the cross-level effects, I focus on the roles of a manager's control style and the organization's strategy-making pattern. Analyses of a multi-industry, multilevel dataset collected from 724 employees and 124 managers in 25 organizations in Finland suggest that all of the individual-level independent variables and a deliberate strategy-making pattern improve role clarity. However, a deliberate strategy-making pattern negatively moderates the relationship between general self-efficacy and role clarity. Finally, even though an outcome-based control system causes role ambiguity among employees in most functional areas, it may be an effective driver of role clarity among employees in sales jobs.

Olli-Pekka Kauppila

Papers

Creating ambidexterity by integrating and balancing structurally separate interorganizational partnerships

The Social-Cognitive Underpinnings of Employees' Ambidextrous Behaviour and the Supportive Role of Group Managers' Leadership

Alliance management capability and firm performance: : Using resource-based theory to look inside the process black box

Knowledge sharing through virtual teams across borders and boundaries

So, What Am I Supposed to Do? A Multilevel Examination of Role Clarity