A Longitudinal Perspective on Organizational Ambidexterity

Organizational ambidexterity has recently been named a "hot topic" in strategy research (Birkinshaw and Gupta, 2014: 2). It is defined as a firm's ability to simultaneously pursue exploration and exploitation (Gupta, Smith, and Shalley, 2006), and has emerged as a "new research paradigm in organization theory" (Raisch, Birkinshaw, Probst, and Tushman, 2009: 685). Over the last two decades, scholars have studied ambidexterity from many different theoretical perspectives, mostly adopting cross-sectional research designs (Raisch and Birkinshaw, 2008). Contributing to this cross-sectional work, this dissertation takes a longitudinal perspective on ambidexterity, focusing on the role of time in the exploration exploitation dilemma. Time has an important function in understanding organizational ambidexterity: The outcomes of exploration and exploitation differ with regard to time (March, 1991), and time can be a solution to balance both conflicting tasks (Boumgarden, Nickerson, and Zenger, 2012). In summary, "the adoption of time as an important research lens (…) allows for a deeper exploration of the dynamic processes underlying the emergence of organizational ambidexterity" (Raisch et al., 2009: 689). This dissertation consists of five papers, each of which stresses time's role in organizational ambidexterity from a different perspective. For example, Paper 1 investigates how firms' exploration-exploitation balance changes over time, whereas Paper 4 draws a comparison between the simultaneous and sequential pursuit of exploration and exploitation. The papers adopt different levels (firm, project, and individual-level) of analysis and apply distinct methodologies (qualitative and quantitative). This dissertation contributes to theory and practice. First, by introducing the novel concept of dynamic ambidexterity, it provides a longitudinal perspective on how firms adjust their simultaneous exploration-exploitation balance over time. Second, it provides insights into how and why firms often end up with unbalanced allocations, that is, over-exploration or exploitation. Finally, this dissertation introduces several mechanisms that allow firms to achieve exploration-exploitation balance over time. These mechanisms comprise the analysis of firm resources (Paper 4), the composition of firms' organizational models (Paper 5), or the use of acquisitions as a firm-external mechanism to pursue exploration and exploitation (Paper 3).