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Firms face high velocity conditions today that render product market strategies increasingly temporal. Strategic flexibility is critical for enabling rapid adaptation to a changing environment. At the same time, managerial commitment to product‐market strategy signifies the extent to which a manager comprehends and supports the strategy and reflects a necessary sense of ownership for any chosen product‐market strategy. The purpose of this paper, then, is to examine strategically ambidextrous firms through the twin lenses of flexibility and commitment to determine whether performance benefits accrue from such characteristics.

While traditional research streams examine strategic flexibility and commitment to product‐market strategy as opposing ends of a continuum, this paper adopts a broader perspective and examines strategic flexibility and commitment to product‐market strategy as elements of strategically ambidextrous firms. Cluster analysis is used to identify groups of high and low strategically ambidextrous firms.

Strategically ambidextrous firms exhibit commitment to product‐market strategy, which enables the effective realisation of selected strategies through focusing managerial attention and firm resources, and strategic flexibility, which enables adaptation of the planned product‐market strategy based on feedback received, or abandonment followed by new strategic choices and impetus. The paper reveals that firms with high strategic ambidexterity exhibit significantly greater levels of strategic resources, decentralisation, product‐market strategy process effectiveness, and implementation effectiveness compared with low ambidexterity firms. Thus, strategic ambidexterity is revealed to endow significant performance benefits.

This paper addresses the need to examine ambidexterity as “flexible commitment”.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal how organizational learning at the strategic and operational levels (i.e. strategic learning and business learning, respectively) contribute to the development of organizational ambidexterity along the growth of enterprises from an evolutionary view.

The authors conducted a longitudinal single case study on Huawei – a leading Chinese firm in the telecommunication industry. Data were collected from various sources including interviews, senior speeches, scholarly publications, company magazines and other documents, and was analyzed in line with the principles of grounded theory.

This research reveals that the case company (Huawei) constructed organizational ambidexterity with different foci during different development stages. The organization’s ambidextrous capability evolves over time, shifting from one domain to another. Such ambidexterity development was largely beneficial from the multilevel organizational learning at both the strategic level (focussing on the whole organization and long-term goals) and operational level (focussing on local interests and short-term goals).

This paper represents one of the earliest works to uncover the ambidexterity building process from an evolutionary approach that requires the collection of longitudinal data. Also, the paper proposes a multi-level learning framework for ambidexterity building in practice. This framework distinguishes strategic learning from business learning and projects the two types of learning into learning at four levels-individual, team, intra-organizational, and inter-organizational, which can be leveraged to guide division of labor among hierarchical levels during the progressive development of ambidexterity.

This paper aims to develop and empirically test a framework articulating the effects of strategic orientations (entrepreneurial orientation and market orientation) on leveraging ambidexterity. Further, the paper examines the moderating effects of knowledge stock (market knowledge and technological knowledge) on the relationship between ambidexterity and firm performance to gain additional insights into how ambidexterity can be leveraged in an organization.

Data were obtained from CEOs (or equivalent members of the top management team) of 234 firms. The adequacy and psychometric properties of all measures were evaluated and purified using a maximum likelihood confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and the hypotheses were tested using ordinary least squares (OLS). A number of post hoc tests were conducted to develop a nuanced understanding of proposed effects.

While both strategic orientations enhance an organization’s ability to be ambidextrous, results show that some types of knowledge stocks facilitate, whereas other types hinder the influence of ambidexterity on firm performance.

Both strategic orientations enable ambidexterity; however, technological knowledge stock impedes the effect of ambidexterity on firm performance, while market knowledge stock enhances this relation. Cross-sectional nature of the study imposes limitations on causal inferences.

Different strategic orientations provide organizations with a cluster of knowledge acquisition and utilization capabilities that enable ambidexterity. However, organizations should be wary of indiscriminate accumulation of knowledge stocks – while certain types enhance the effect of ambidexterity, others may create competency traps or core rigidities and inhibit the effect of ambidexterity.

This study integrates related, yet hitherto fragmented, research streams to demonstrate the interconnectedness between strategic orientations, ambidexterity and existing knowledge stock. Several theoretical and managerial implications are identified.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents of organizational ambidexterity of foreign ventures in an emerging market. Organizational ambidexterity, the simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation, represents a key innovation strategy. Yet, the driving factors of such innovation strategies for foreign ventures competing in emerging markets have been underresearched. In this study, unpacking the construct of organizational ambidexterity into two dimensions (i.e. the combined dimension [CD] and the balance dimension [BD]), the authors aim to investigate how firm-level and industry-level factors drive foreign ventures in pursuing exploration and exploitation and maximizing the benefits of both.

This study adopts the hierarchical multiple regression approach using a sample of foreign ventures operating in high-tech manufacturing industries in China.

The authors find that the firm-level factor of strategic flexibility leads positively to the CD of organizational ambidexterity, whereas the industry-level factor of technological turbulence has a significantly positive impact on the BD.

This study provides important insights into the driving factors of organizational ambidexterity for foreign ventures competing in emerging markets.

In this chapter, the authors examine the main effect of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) – a firm’s strategic entrepreneurial posture – on balancing exploration and exploitation in the form of organizational ambidexterity. Resource-constrained firms face an imperative to conduct innovative activities, survive hostile environments, and compete with larger and more resource-rich firms. The authors contend that firms can address these potential impediments through achieving ambidexterity via dynamic capabilities, firm-specific resources, and institutional factors. Specifically, The authors review the EO and ambidexterity literatures and summarize extant arguments related to the relationship between EO, exploration, and exploitation. The authors also discuss the most prominent scales and measures of EO, exploration, and exploitation. Moreover, the authors discuss operationalizational challenges that should be considered when conducting EO–ambidexterity research and suggest future research directions by specifying an agenda outlining useful theoretical perspectives and various contingencies that may influence the EO–ambidexterity relationship.

Since March (1991) presented his ideas on organizational learning, hundreds of empirical tests have been conducted on relationships among the activities of exploration, exploitation, ambidexterity, and firm performance. Despite continued interest in his ideas, there has not been a systematic assessment of extant research to reveal whether, and to what extent, these activities relate to firm performance. This study uses meta-analysis to take a next step by aggregating results of 117 studies from more than 21,000 firms. I find strong performance effects for exploration and exploitation, but contrary to received theory, I discover ambidexterity yields weaker effects than a focus on either exploration or exploitation. Thus, I leverage these findings to offer future research opportunities.

The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the organizational capability of ambidexterity into a typology of hierarchical dimensions that includes each type’s enabling mechanisms and capabilities.

This work reviews and integrates extant literature on ambidexterity and the hierarchy of capabilities to distinguish dimensions of ambidexterity and link each type to capabilities identified in prior research.

A hierarchy involving zero-, first- and second-order ambidexterity is developed. Mechanisms and capabilities for creating and sustaining each type of ambidexterity are described.

As only an initial and conceptual foray toward the purpose stated above, this research does not attempt to argue a comprehensive theoretical framework. Nor does it intend to extend or propose new theory regarding the origins of ambidexterity capabilities or the specific causal relationships between them.

Although prior literature emphasizes approaches for achieving and maintaining ambidexterity, these generally refer to what is described here as zero-order ambidexterity. The hierarchical and holistic system view offered in this research suggests greater importance for second-order ambidexterity and capabilities of top managers for exercising cognitive, behavioral and process leadership complexity.

Recent literature on ambidexterity begins to suggest varied types or levels of ambidexterity. No known work, however, has expressly deconstructed ambidexterity into component dimensions via the hierarchy of capabilities framework.

The manager of the 21st century is expected to succeed in an environment strongly characterized by unprecedented volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). In fact, today’s business environment consists of contradictory pressure and tensions, where competitive advantage could be gained by ambidextrous activities. The concept of ambidexterity has already been discussed by many scholars, but still little is known about managerial practice and actions that are useful for finding the balance between the paradoxes that have been identified at that level. Although there are different tensions, dynamic and evolving according to the changes observed in the environment: more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, the pressure to remain flexible and simultaneously maintain the plan of development, seems to be essential. In recent research studies, networking perspective is mentioned as one of areas worth exploring while analyzing the concept of ambidexterity. For that reason, the main goal of this chapter is to investigate if networking is one of the factors useful for managing ambidexterity. To gain deeper insight, we investigated further, searching for the factors essential for managing ambidexterity: we compared the research results between companies of different sizes to identify any regularities. We focused on ambidexterity reflected by managerial practice where stability/plans and flexibility are implemented simultaneously. We investigated 150 managers using paper-and-pencil interviewing. Our research results confirmed that networking could be one of the main approaches having an impact on ambidextrous activities. However, we cannot conclude that companies are obliged to apply a networking perspective to be ambidextrous, although it could be recommended. Further analysis of companies of different sizes revealed the relationship between ambidexterity and networking in case of small and large companies, and no relation in medium-sized enterprises.

Although prior research highlights the organizational and cognitive challenges associated with achieving innovation ambidexterity, comparatively limited attention has been paid to the affective characteristics that may differentiate top management teams (TMTs) of firms. The authors build on emerging research and identify TMT entrepreneurial passion diversity as an affective characteristic with particular relevance to innovation ambidexterity.

Based on data collected from 195 small- and medium-sized enterprises in China, this study uses ordinary least squares regression models to test the hypotheses.

The results show that TMT passion intensity separation is negatively related to innovation ambidexterity, while TMT passion focus variety has an inverted U-shaped relationship with innovation ambidexterity. In addition, environmental dynamism weakens the effects of TMT passion intensity separation and strengthens the effects of passion focus variety.

This study pushes forward the research agenda on affective microfoundations of innovation ambidexterity. It also reveals the potential dark side of TMT entrepreneurial passion by explicitly delineating its effects on innovation management.

The academic discipline of ambidexterity is recognized as an established field within strategic management and organization theory. Extant works in the field recognize the recent burgeoning academic emphasis on ambidexterity and suggest either an impending focus or a decline of the field. Although there have been attempts to review the field of ambidexterity, most of these reviews have not followed a systematic and scientific approach for extricating the key themes emerging within. The purpose of the study is to inductively and systematically capture the main elements constituting the current boundary of the field.

To achieve the stated purpose, this study uses data/text mining to analyze abstracts of scholarly ambidexterity papers published over the past two decades (1997-2016) in academic journals. Using text-mining, lexical analysis is performed to compute the frequency distribution of words. The frequently occurring words are studied in detail and their association with ambidexterity is also studied by means of co-relation. This analysis (used for generation of first order themes) is then complemented by a manual analysis of each first order theme to come up with trends and sub-themes lying within.

The analysis extracts eight distinct themes that indicate the current boundary of ambidexterity research. The findings highlight the potential areas for future academic attention such as networks, business models, leadership, dynamic capability and their inter-linkages with the field of ambidexterity. Overall, the field of ambidexterity is receiving heightened academic interest coupled with a dynamic proliferation across a host of related management fields. Apart from the required future consolidation, the field also needs new insights to enhance its explanatory power.

This study analyzes abstracts of 504 works on ambidexterity (in the last two decades) to inductively indicate the current boundaries of the field using a data/text mining approach. Papers that do not explicitly mention ambidexterity in their abstracts, title or keywords are not included in the analysis.

The insights of the analysis will not only help researchers but also offer practitioners a good view point about the myriad of paths (not restricted to contextual, structural and temporal) through which ambidexterity can be promoted within and at the organization level.

The three-fold contribution of this study is a systematic and scientific approach adopted to define the current boundary of the field of ambidexterity, followed by an exploration of a set of eight distinct themes and finally the identification of ongoing debates, research gaps and future research questions in light of the analysis performed.