Search results

This study aims to develop a cross-level research model to explore the relationship between team-level contextual ambidexterity and employees' enterprise system (ES) ambidextrous use, and the mediating role of user empowerment in and moderating effect of leader–member exchange (LMX) on the relationship.

This study conducted a sequential mixed-methods approach, which included a quantitative survey and a qualitative case study. The survey, administered to 244 employees in 59 groups from a financial institution, analyzed the relationships between contextual ambidexterity and ES ambidextrous use. Furthermore, the cross-level mediation and moderation effects were explored. The case study, involving nine members in three groups from a manufacturing firm, served to reinforce the validity of the survey results.

Team-level contextual ambidexterity can affect ES ambidextrous use directly or through the partial mediator of user empowerment. Furthermore, this study highlights the moderating role of LMX in the relationship between contextual ambidexterity and user empowerment, thereby improving ES ambidextrous use.

This study contributes to the literature by uncovering the cross-level effect of contextual ambidexterity on ES ambidextrous use through user empowerment, thereby extending the ambidexterity perspective and self-determination theory to the ES context. Additionally, this study provides nuanced insights into how to enhance ES ambidextrous use by revealing the moderating role and moderated mediation effect of LMX anchoring on social exchange theory.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of empowering leadership on contextual ambidexterity. To this end, the authors underscore the underlying mechanism of perceived organizational support (POS). Furthermore, to provide more robust insights into this indirect effect, role ambiguity was examined as a moderator.

The paper is based on a questionnaire survey. Data collected from 219 employees working in three IT small-and-medium enterprises located in Greece.

The findings indicated that empowering leadership is positively related to contextual ambidexterity through POS and, further, this indirect association is contingent on role ambiguity.

The study provides more insights into the important role of leadership in generating contextual ambidexterity. Thus, moderated mediation framework that has empirically tested considers both how and when empowering leadership affects contextual ambidexterity and provides important implications for both theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to propose how a bottom-up creation of an ambidextrous organization can be enabled. By integrating research on “contextual ambidexterity” and “individual and organizational capacity building”, an “innovation capacity building” framework is conceptualized that suggests how balance between exploration and exploitation can be maintained.

The study is conceptual. As no data are utilized, focus is on discussing the links between the two theoretical perspectives and the advantages of the proposed innovation capacity building framework.

The innovation capacity building framework discusses the influence, both positive and negative, of the local organizational context for ambidexterity, and the interactions required such as feedback between the management team and the employees so they together can build an ambidextrous working culture. A culture in which it is the individual employee that is responsible for switching between activities related to exploration and exploitation and where the management team empowers the employees to do so.

This study focuses on contextual ambidexterity and how contextual ambidexterity can be implemented as a way of working in contemporary organizations. The originality lies in the proposed framework and in the dedicated focus on “how” ambidexterity can be implemented in organizations.

This study aims to offer and validate an integrated marketing capability-product innovations framework. Particularly, it aims to examine the role of adaptive marketing capability in enabling market ambidexterity and incremental as well as radical product innovation. Also it intends to investigate the moderating role of transformational leadership between adaptive marketing capability and market ambidexterity.

Manufacturing firms in Pakistan, an emerging economy, are taken as the context for this study. A designed survey questionnaire is used for data collection. Partial least square technique is employed to empirically validate and test the hypothesized model with a sample of 192 manufacturing firms. Particularly, the two-stage approach in SmartPLS is used to validate measurement models, and structural equation modeling technique is used to test the proposed hypothesis.

The findings not only confirm that adaptive marketing capability is instrumental to both incremental and radical product innovations but also reveal that adaptive marketing capability serves an important antecedent to market ambidexterity shedding new lights on its mediating role in the relationship of adaptive marketing capability with incremental and radical product innovations. Moreover, the results find that the effectiveness of adaptive marketing capability to support market ambidexterity may involve a possible trade-off between exploitation and exploration when the leaders exhibit a low or high level of transformational leadership behavior.

This study contributes to outside-in strategic perspective and contextual ambidexterity literature by revealing the role of adaptive marketing capability as an important enabler of market ambidexterity which, in turn, allows the firm to simultaneously introduce incremental and radical product innovations. In this way, this study advances the current understanding of the antecedents and consequences of contextual ambidexterity. Also, this study provides insight into the types of capabilities needed for the firm's contextual and employees' behavioral adaptation to simultaneously manage exploitation and exploration within the same business unit which was lacking in the previous literature. Further, this study also offers a novel understanding of the conditional role of transformational leadership between adaptive marketing capability and market ambidexterity.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate how the advice-giving affects innovative capability by involving knowledge exchange and combination as a mediator and contextual ambidexterity as an important contingency.

Based on a survey of 96 Chinese teams, a set of hypotheses was tested using regression analyzes.

The findings showed that contextual ambidexterity moderates the indirect effect of advice-giving on innovative capability through knowledge exchange and combination. When contextual ambidexterity is high, workers engage in more knowledge exchange and combination for the team at intermediate levels of advice-giving, the indirect effect of advice-giving at low levels and at high levels exist. When contextual ambidexterity is low, there is no indirect effect of advice-giving at any level.

Managers should be aware of the inverted U-shaped relationship between advice-giving and innovative capability and strengthen the construction of contextual ambidexterity.

This paper makes up for the theoretical gap between advice-giving and innovative capability. Furthermore, it provides a theoretical reference for practitioners to improve their innovative capability.

In this paper, we focus on how and when organizations adopt different types of ambidexterity to facilitate projects that operate with fundamentally different time scales compared with the dominant functions of the organization.

Using a comparative case study design, four case studies were conducted of long-term projects in two similar manufacturing plants within the same organization.

We found organizations first use structural and sequential ambidexterity in change efforts, during which new process knowledge is developed. When structural and sequential ambidexterity are not viable, change agents use this developed knowledge to support contextual ambidexterity. This contextual ambidexterity allows change agents to move between distinct time conceptions of event time and clock time.

One of the limitations of this study was that it only focused on two plants within one organization in order to control for variation. Future studies should look at a wider range of companies, technologies and industries.

While structurally and temporally decoupling change efforts help with differentiation of new technological change, there are limitations with these efforts. It is important to build an organization’s contextual ambidexterity as well as organizational supports to facilitate switching between clock time and event time.

This paper helps explain how and when organizations use different types of ambidexterity in resolving temporal conflicts when implementing longer-term technological change in fast-paced manufacturing settings.

Due to the global labor market challenges, international companies react and adjust fast to these circumstances by implementing digital solutions into all business processes. Organizational ambidexterity is seen as the response of digital transformation and it can be divided into structural, contextual, and sequential dimensions. In this context, organizations representing the smart industry will need employees with specific competencies which let them meet technological challenges.

This chapter aims to clarify the state of opinion on expectations towards, and preparedness for, the impact of Industry 4.0 on human resources management and the implementation of various types of ambidexterity in these companies. We have conducted interviews with key HR informants from manufacturing companies operating in Germany and Poland. We have found that Industry 4.0 has a significant impact on HR practices. In both international companies, various digital solutions in employee recruitment, development, and performance, have been implemented. There have also been mature examples in both companies of structural, contextual, and sequential ambidexterity.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the implementation of an ambidexterity strategy in a large Italian Company that works in the energy field. The aim of the study is to understand how contextual ambidexterity has been achieved during a business process management (BPM) approach by describing the main variables that interacted during the project implementation.

The authors based their study both on primary (direct observation and interviews) and secondary (company manuals, books and procedures) qualitative investigations of BPM approach based on three business process re-engineering (BPR) projects and nine total quality management (TQM) projects, focused on change team behaviors, dynamics and dialogues.

The authors observed that the implementation of simultaneously radical and incremental change projects has been influenced by the exploration and exploitation activities related to every single TQM and BPR project considered. The findings suggest that the overall project has been influenced by four main underlying variables, which are task specialization and systems interoperability (knowledge transfer), identity and leadership (knowledge conversion) and two output variables (ambiguity and feedback to change), that, by interacting, enable ambidexterity.

BPM is an important option to consider within the ambidexterity theory, being conceptually conceived as an approach in which TQM and BPR actually complement each other. Moreover, the results contextualize the importance of the change management team (CMT) to manage the connections between knowledge creation and refinement, and vice versa, depending particularly on the knowledge conversion process enabled by a flexible team culture. The focus of the study is mainly at the BPR and TQM project level. The authors consider structural ambidexterity and its enabling mechanisms as the framework in which BPM is implemented. Moreover, research limitations are related both to the specificity of the context, a large, highly specialized and mechanistic company and to the qualitative approach that may reduce the generalization of the empirical results.

Managers need to be cognizant and aware both of the BPM techniques, in order to sustain ambidexterity, and of ambiguity and change feedback as variables that enable the effective connection of the different steps of innovation or refinement strategy and, therefore, of ambidexterity. Moreover, the contextual factors such as leadership and people identity should be considered and managed as important variables related to change.

The originality of this paper is related to improving the understanding of how to implement the theoretical concept of ambidexterity in a real world organization, by providing new evidence that highlights the importance of contextual ambidexterity within a structural ambidexterity strategy during a BPM project.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the multi-faceted role of metaroutines in dealing with nested ambidexterity challenges experienced during new product introductions (NPIs) at Tata Motors, an Indian automotive giant.

This study utilizes an in-depth multi-level case study highlighting the ambidexterity dynamics across strategic, business unit and functional levels.

The authors visualize the NPI system found in the firm, including the interactions between structure, process and governance, as a metaroutine. Based on this visualization, the authors argue that certain ostensive (like voice of customer, commonality) and performative (role of leadership and creative recombination) aspects of the metaroutine aid exploratory and exploitative learning across levels at Tata Motors. Further, the authors argue that the role of embedded NPI metaroutine aspects in promoting multi-level ambidexterity offers a distinct form when compared with other academically established forms of structural, contextual and temporal ambidexterity.

This study focuses on the aspects of the NPI metaroutine that enable ambidexterity within the studied firm. The authors argue that apart from the structural, temporal and contextual mechanisms, managers also need to focus on the nuances of NPI metaroutines and their potential to promote ambidexterity across levels.

The authors visualize the interactions between the process, structure and governance mechanisms, related to NPI, as a metaroutine. The authors argue that metaroutine enabled approaches to ambidexterity offer a distinct form when compared with other academically established forms of structural, contextual and temporal ambidexterity. Also, metaroutine enabled ambidexterity explains a possible way through which multi-level ambidexterity can be promoted and managed within organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between complexity leadership and contextual ambidexterity as well as the mediating effect of organisational innovation climate in this link. This study is an answer to a call on which leadership approach and mediating factors can meet today’s seemingly contradictory challenges of efficiently managing business demands, while simultaneously searching for new opportunities.

The researchers analysed 1,204 usable survey responses from employees of South African organisations. Analysis was in the form of structural equation modelling. Mediation analysis was carried out on estimates of the indirect effect.

Results show that complexity leadership was a strong predictor of innovation climate; in turn, innovation climate positively impacts exploratory innovation by 64 per cent; complexity leadership and innovation climate positively affect exploitation by 57 per cent. The innovation climate plays a total mediator role between complexity leadership and exploratory innovation and a partial effect on exploitation.

This study gives human resource management (HRM) insight into strategically directing leadership recruitment and development towards creating an organisational climate to enhance ambidexterity. HRM must conduct regular climate surveys to ascertain whether current leadership is creating an environment that enables exploratory and exploitative innovation.

The authors’ contribution includes a theoretical contribution to the emerging field of complexity leadership by offering conceptual as well as empirical evidence of its role in ambidexterity. This study extends previous research in highlighting organisational climate’s mediating role of being open to new ideas to enable exploratory innovation.