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Structural Differentiation and Ambidexterity: The Mediating Role of Integration Mechanisms

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.
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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.
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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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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present methods for assessing agreement among the judgments made by a single group of judges on a single variable in regard to a single target, such as a manuscript, a lower-level manager, or a team.
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Ambidextrous Organizations: Managing Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change:

TL;DR: The ambidextrous organization as discussed by the authors is an organization that simultaneously pursues both incremental and discontinuous innovation, and adapts the culture and strategy of an organization to its current environment, but to do so in a way that does not undermine its ability to adjust to radical changes in that environment.
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Exploitation, Exploration, and Process Management: The Productivity Dilemma Revisited

TL;DR: In this article, a contingency view of process management's influence on both technological innovation and organizational adaptation is developed, arguing that while process management activities are beneficial for organizations in stable contexts, they are fundamentally inconsistent with all but incremental innovation and change.
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Knowledge flows within multinational corporations

TL;DR: In this article, a nodal (i.e., subsidiary) level analysis of knowledge transfer within multinational corporations (MNCs) is proposed, where the authors predict that knowledge outflows from a subsidiary would be positively associated with value of the subsidiary's knowledge stock, its motivational disposition to share knowledge, and the richness of transmission channels.
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