How to Make Exploratory Unit Ambidextrous? Navigating Contradictions of Exploration

Abstract

Although exploratory units constitute a structural mechanism that buffer rigidity and inertia from firms’ core businesses, tensions and challenges may arise when there is a changing strategy at the corporate level that misaligned with the initial purpose of the unit. In this paper, we explain how managers in spatially separated exploration units of an organization deal with the conflicting requirements of exploring emerging industries and senior executives’ initiatives to align the organization around the temporal focus on restoration of core businesses. We uncover internal mechanisms that reveals how an exploratory unit become ambidextrous that enable them to maintain a strategic alignment with the main organization while ensuring required adaptability for exploration in emerging industries. Our findings draw on the longitudinal analysis of exploration activities of a business unit at a global telecommunication firm that responsible for pursuing opportunities in the emerging Internet of Things industry (IoT) between 2015 and 2019. This study contributes to extant literature by developing a link between contextual and structural ambidexterity at the business unit level, and particularly, by showing managerial approaches through which an organizational unit become ambidextrous.