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Structural Differentiation and Ambidexterity: The Mediating Role of Integration Mechanisms

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TLDR
The findings suggest that the previously asserted direct effect of structural differentiation on ambidexterity operates through informal senior team and formal organizational integration mechanisms, and contributes to a greater clarity and better understanding of how organizations may effectively pursue exploration and exploitation simultaneously to achieve ambideXterity.
Abstract
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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Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw on a variety of cognate literatures to discuss the field-level structural characteristics and organizational attributes that shape institutional complexity and explore the repertoire of strategies and structures that organizations deploy to cope with multiple, competing demands.
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Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance

TL;DR: An overview of the seven articles included in this special issue is provided and several avenues for future research are suggested.
Posted Content

Organizational Ambidexterity: Past, Present and Future

TL;DR: 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 as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI

Exploration and Exploitation Within and Across Organizations

TL;DR: The exploration and exploitation framework has attracted substantial interest from scholars studying phenomena such as organizational learning, knowledge management, innovation, organizational design, and strategic alliances as discussed by the authors, and it has become an essential lens for interpreting various behaviors and outcomes within and across organizations.
Journal ArticleDOI

CROSSROADS---Microfoundations of Performance: Balancing Efficiency and Flexibility in Dynamic Environments

TL;DR: Overall, this work contributes a more accurate view of how leaders effectively balance between efficiency and flexibility by emphasizing heuristics-based “strategies of simple rules,” multiple environmental realities, and higher-order “expert” cognition.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Understanding ambidexterity at the individual level: task assignment perspective

TL;DR: The findings suggest that the assignment of the ambidextrous task generates the highest individual performance under some conditions, which negates the assumption that individuals find it difficult to handle both exploration and exploitation.
Journal ArticleDOI

Editor, Executive and Entrepreneur: Strategic Paradoxes in the Digital Age

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify and discuss inherent paradoxes and their implications for firm performance in industry-specific strategies, where empirical industry data shows a pattern of conflict between explorative growth strategies and exploitative profit strategies.
Journal ArticleDOI

Beggars can be choosers: Resource scarcity, dynamism, search activities, and their joint impact on performance

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the performance implications of combinations of internal and external exploratory and exploitative search in resource-scarce environments, under conditions of high and low dynamism.
Book ChapterDOI

Automation as Management of Paradoxical Tensions: The Role of Industrial Engineering

TL;DR: In this article, the introduction of an automated parcel sorting system in a major company in the logistic and parcel delivery industry was explored, and a grounded theory of ambidexterity in an automation enhancement program was presented.
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