ORGANISATIONAL AMBIDEXTERITY

Organisational Ambidexterity: Creating and Managing Successful Innovative Organisations

Organisational Ambidexterity: Creating and Managing Successful Innovative Organisations

Introduction

During the past decade ambidexterity has emerged as the central research stream in organisation science to investigate how organisations manage to remain successful over time. Using the lens of organisational learning, ambidexterity can be defined as the simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation to achieve efficiency and innovation. The history of old, successful organisations shows that they ensure long-term survival by ensuring innovation while continuously building on established routines and capabilities. Thus, managing the tensions between stability and change is a central topic in organisation science and management practice (Carmeli and Halevi, 2009, 207-218). Ambidexterity has emerged as the central research stream in trying to answer how organisations can simultaneously pursue the antagonistic learning modes of exploration and exploitation, i.e. how to explore new opportunities while contemporarily exploiting existing capabilities. However, despite of increasing and widespread endeavours to explore the antecedents (e.g. organisational design, structure, leadership) and moderating factors (e.g. environmental dynamism, market competitiveness, firm scope) of organisational ambidexterity as well as their interplay, there are still several blind spots on the ambidexterity research map. One of those blind spots refers to the role of the human resource management (HRM) system to support different ambidextrous learning architectures (Johnson, 2005, 1249-1259).

Scholars argue that different antecedents induce different forms of ambidexterity and the configuration of an organisation's learning architecture varies as it develops and grows. However, previous research neglected the pivotal role of the HRM system as a central element to guide human behaviour and consequently organisational learning processes in different ambidextrous designs (Shalley, 2006, 693-706). To close this research gap, we show how different forms of ambidexterity with various strategic purposes can be created and maintained by the means of specific bundles of HRM practices. Therefore we link the commonly accepted issues within literature to strategic human resource management (SHRM) of horizontal and vertical fit to ambidexterity. Thus, we discuss the role of consistent HRM systems for the specific needs of different ambidextrous learning architectures along an evolutionary path. We contribute to literature in three ways: First, we investigate the role of HRM practices serving as organisational routines in order to constitute and guide different ambidextrous learning architectures. Second, we show how consistent HRM systems as specific bundles of HRM practices foster these different ambidextrous strategies. Third, we emphasize the changing challenges of “fit” of an HRM system when firms transit from one strategy to another. The paper proceeds as follows: In the next section, we define the notion of organisational ambidexterity. Subsequently, we briefly review past research on the interplay between ambidexterity and SHRM. Then, we present three different ambidextrous learning designs along an evolutionary pathway and we argue the role of SHRM for each design. Finally, we discuss our findings and conclude that organisations need to deliberately align HRM practices to their required learning architectures.

Ambidexterity - A Multifaceted Term

Although managing the interplay between stability and change has been a central topic in organisation ...