KEY INDIVIDUAL ACTOR ROLES AND BEHAVIORAL CHARACTERISTICS FOR THE COORDINATION OF MULTIPLE APPROACHES TO AMBIDEXTERITY

Back to Page Authors: Linda Onyinye Nnenna Nwabunike

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Keywords: coordination, ambidexterity, approaches, actors, social capital

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Abstract: Innovation is essential for survival and profitability in high-technology firms. However, the ability of an organisation to handle the requirements for exploring and exploiting knowledge with equal dexterity, is difficult for most firms, especially those that lack resources. Both exploration and exploitation routines compete for resources and require contradictory skills and expertise. The understanding about how firms can balance the creation of knowledge and leveraging of existing knowledge (ambidexterity) is still growing. The conflicting views about the approaches to organisational ambidexterity has been seen to both operate within an organisation, an approach termed hybrid ambidexterity. Despite the organisational level studies about the combination of approaches, the individual roles involved in the management of ambidexterity with multiple approaches is lacking in literature. This paper proposed to provide understanding about the roles of individual actors in the management of ambidexterity, through a theoretical synthesis and integrative review of research from coordination, organisation design and social capital. A conceptual framework is that integrates the several approaches and the way individual actors are involved is proposed. The review shows that informal coordination mechanisms of actors are central in the combination of different approaches for the actualization of the ambidextrous strategy of the firm. This paper has potential to highlight the role of actors in balancing the demands for creating a behavioural context for contextual ambidexterity and the coordination of separated units with structural ambidexterity, within and outside the organisation boundaries.

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