Ambidextrous Organizations

Organizational ambidexterity refers to an organization’s ability to be efficient in its management of today’s business and also adaptable for coping with tomorrow’s changing demand. Just as being ambidextrous means being able to use both the left and right hand equally, organizational ambidexterity requires the organizations to use both exploration and exploitation techniques to be successful.
Ambidextrous leadership consists of three elements (1) opening leader behaviors to foster exploration, (2) closing leader behaviors to foster exploitation, (3) and the temporal flexibility to switch between both as the situation requires (Rosing et al., 2011). Opening leadership behaviors include: allowing for multiple ways to accomplish a task, experimentation and errors, whereas closing behaviors include; monitoring routines, sticking to plans and minimizing errors.
Organizational ambidexterity was defined as an organization’s ability to be aligned and efficient in its management of today’s business demands as well as being adaptive to changes in the environment at the same time. This term of organizational ambidexterity was first used by Duncan, however, it was March that had been credited for developing and generating greater interest in this concept, especially in the late 20th and early 21st century. Ambidexterity in an organization is achieved by balancing exploration and exploitation, which allows the organization to be creative and adaptable, while also continuing to rely on more traditional, proven methods of business.
Organizational ambidexterity is defined broadly, and several other terms are also highly related or similar to the construct of ambidextrous organization, including organizational learning, technological innovation, organizational adaptation, strategic management, and organizational design. Things such as reconciling exploitation and exploration, the simultaneity of induced and autonomous strategy processes, synchronizing incremental and discontinuous innovation, and balancing search and stability also tend to refer to the same underlying construct as ambidextrous organization.
There are studies on how structural and behavioral mechanisms affect organizational ambidexterity and studies on how ambidextrous organizational designs affect organizational ambidexterity. Whereas earlier studies on structural and behavioral mechanisms regarded the trade-offs between exploration and exploitation to be insurmountable, more recent research has paid attention to a range of organizational solutions to engender the existence of ambidexterity.
The studies on “ambidextrous organizations” take the organization as the unit of analysis and ambidextrous organizing is conceptualized as the simultaneous pursuit and combination of incremental and discontinuous innovation. “Ambidextrous organizations” are needed if the failure to balance exploitation and exploration is to be overcome: “the ability to pursue simultaneously both incremental and discontinuous innovation results from hosting multiple contradictory structures, processes, and cultures”
Recently the focus on organizational ambidexterity has become more concentrated on how leaders act ambidextrously to achieve organizational ambidexterity. Senior managers may be the key for facilitating the context and social base for ambidexterity. Noting that ambidextrous organizations require significant amounts of mobilization, coordination, and integration activities to maintain both exploitation and exploration, informal and social integration of the senior team as well as the cross-functional interfaces of the formal organization contribute to the success of organizational ambidexterity significantly (Jansen, Tempelaar, van den Bosch, & Volberda, 2009).
The construct of ambidextrous leadership has also been linked to the combination of leadership styles (Jansen et al., 2009). Leaders who are transformational encourage “out of the box thinking”, information sharing and question assumptions. Transformational leaders promote exploration and innovative thinking. Transactional leaders focus on making incremental improvements and making the best use of existing processes. The transactional leadership style promotes exploitative behaviors. An ambidextrous leader is able to switch back and forth between transformation/exploration and transaction/exploitation as needed, in other words, being able to switch between different leadership styles at the appropriate time, in order to foster innovation and then implement plans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambidextrous_organization