Expanding the scope of organizational ambidexterity

Abstract

Strategic management scholars pay growing attention to the tensions that stem from the combination of heterogeneous and contradictory types of action within firms. In particular, the difficulties bound in the necessity to articulate short- and long-term oriented activities or logics, to work on existing and future capabilities, have been widely investigated, and gave rise to a rich literature about the notions of exploration/exploitation and organizational ambidexterity. In this paper we argue that the exploration of future capabilities is not the only source for tensions regarding the preparation of future. We claim that the necessity to maintain, reproduce and develop existing capabilities, which is generally regarded as a sub-dimension of exploitation, is actually a distinct category of action that can also conflict with short-term performance requirements. Through a qualitative research conducted within a 1000-person engineering department, we emphasize that such activities (that include, for instance, the informal acquisition of existing technologies and knowledge by newcomers) can be mutually exclusive with exploitation activities and compete with them for the allocation and retention of scarce resources. Such tensions may threaten firms' long-term performance as much as those between exploration and exploitation, which is why we believe they call for expanding the scope of organizational ambidexterity.