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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 study is to apply the concept of organizational ambidexterity as a conceptual lens to increase the understanding of tensions between exploitation (continuity) and exploration (change) in Agile software development (ASD) project teams, and particularly the balancing (ambidextrous) strategies utilized.

A conceptual framework was constructed from interdisciplinary sources on ambidexterity. A literature review of publications on ambidexterity in ASD was then performed, and the results from the selected publications were classified according to an extension of the conceptual framework.

Contextual ambidexterity in ASD is affected by the four basic coherent concepts: time, task, team and transition. The study found that most ambidextrous factors and strategies were task and team-related. In addition, a mixture of hard (performance) strategies and soft (social) strategies is needed in order for people/teams to (be able to) become ambidextrous.

To provide a better understanding of ASD, it is important to identify a broader set of ambidextrous factors and strategies that can impact ASD project teams. The expanded conceptual framework can serve as a basis for future empirical research and provide insights to practitioners on how to strengthen ambidexterity in ASD projects.

The contribution is of great importance for ASD research and practice, as ASD methods are a popular method for managing projects within ASD and in other nonsoftware organizations. In addition, as more and more organizations struggle to deal with rapidly changing environments, interest in the phenomena of paradoxical tensions and the strategy (ambidexterity) to deal with these tensions increase.

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.

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.

This paper develops a practice approach to institutional ambidexterity. In doing so, it first explores the ‘promise’ of institutional ambidexterity as a concept to address shortcomings with the treatment of complexity in institutional theory. However, we argue that this is an empty promise because ambidexterity remains an organizational level construct that neither connects to the institutional level, or to the practical actions and interactions within which individuals enact institutions. We therefore suggest a practice approach that we develop into a conceptual framework for fulfilling the promise of institutional ambidexterity. The second part of the paper outlines what a practice approach is and the variation in practice-based insights into institutional ambidexterity that we might expect in contexts of novel or routine institutional complexity. Finally, the paper concludes with a research agenda that highlights the potential of practice to extend institutional theory through new research approaches to well-established institutional theory questions, interests and established-understandings.

It is increasingly recognised that managers play a central role in organisational ambidexterity. While some scholars have recently begun to explain the nature and antecedents of ambidextrous behaviour among managers, much remains to be learned about the micro-foundations of this behaviour. Adopting a people–situation interaction approach, this paper investigates the antecedents to managerial ambidexterity from both situational and individual difference considerations.

This study adopts a quantitative approach using a combination of survey and archival data from 305 managers.

The results indicate that learning goal orientation is positively related with managerial ambidexterity, whereas there is no significant relationship between functional experience breadth and managerial ambidexterity. In testing moderation effects, discretionary slack is found to positively moderate the association between learning goal orientation and ambidexterity and between functional experiences and ambidexterity.

This paper provides suggestions on employees selection and training, along with organisational support, in enacting managerial ambidexterity.

Guided by individual difference theory, this paper adds value to one’s understanding of the antecedents to managerial ambidexterity. It contributes to the ambidexterity literature from the micro-foundation perspective.

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.

This paper is to examine whether organizational ambidexterity leads to success. Moreover, it attempts to understand how proactiveness and quality orientation might create and maintain ambidexterity. Environmental uncertainty as a moderator is also examined.

To achieve these objectives an empirical survey was conducted among 449 firms in Greece. Initially, EFA and then CFA were applied. Finally, the structural relationships among the latent factors were determined through SEM.

Organizational ambidexterity leads to superior business performance, moreover, the two antecedents were positively related to organizational ambidexterity. Environmental uncertainty acts as a moderator between organizational ambidexterity– business performance and proactiveness–organizational ambidexterity.

A research challenge is to understand how organizations develop ambidexterity competency in different organizational structure. Moreover, it will be important to expand the model by taking into consideration different factors of antecedents, for example, type of innovation or different strategic orientations.

This study sends the message that companies focussing on specific antecedents can be led to higher ambidexterity capabilities, which in turn act as a catalyst for business improvement.

The proposed model provides plausible guidelines that advance organizational ambidexterity research in the companies.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is an exploratory orientation because its dimensions such as innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking are the essence of exploration that entails uncertain returns. While literature suggests firms might need to counterbalance and complement EO with another orientation for organisational success, research on this area remains limited. Drawing on organisational learning theory, the purpose of this article is to explore whether and how the EO dimensions and organisational ambidexterity complement each other to enhance new product performance. More specifically, the authors explore the configurations of innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking and ambidexterity for superior new product performance under different levels of market turbulence.

Based on a configurational perspective, the authors applied fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on a sample of 88 small and medium-sized firms from the UK. Using fsQCA allows the authors to uncover the potential complementary role between the EO dimensions and ambidexterity for superior new product performance.

The results of this paper reveal three configurations that are sufficient to produce superior new product performance. The results suggest that the EO dimensions and ambidexterity can complement each other to enhance new product performance. Further, under the turbulent market environment, the EO dimensions are also sufficient to produce superior new product performance.

By adopting a configurational perspective using fsQCA, the study provides a more holistic understanding of how the EO dimensions work together to influence new product performance. It also contributes to the literature by uncovering the complementary role of the EO dimensions and ambidexterity in shaping new product performance.

Extant research has integrated ambidexterity perspective into international business studies and calls for emerging market multinational enterprises (EM MNEs) to implement exploration and exploitation activities simultaneously in foreign markets. However, less attention has been paid to empirically test whether and how international ambidexterity can benefit the innovation performance of EM MNEs. Based on the data of international manufacturing firms in China, this paper explores the relationship between international ambidexterity and innovation performance and investigates four contingency factors of top management team (TMT): two external resource accumulation elements (i.e. TMT business ties and TMT political ties) and two internal resource integration elements (i.e. TMT contingency rewards and TMT social integration).

The author conducts multiple hierarchical linear regression analysis to test the hypothesis by collecting survey data from 227 MNEs from several Economic Development Zones located in Zhejiang province in China.

The results show that international ambidexterity is positively related to innovation performance, and the international ambidexterity–innovation performance relationship is amplified when TMTs build strong ties with external business partners and political departments, when EM MNEs link top managers' income to team collective performance and create a highly social integrated TMT.

The results contributes to answer the question that how well EM MNEs will succeed and enrich the context specificity of international ambidexterity. The findings also help us better understand the inconsistent empirical findings in organizational ambidexterity by uncovering the contingency role of several TMT attributes.