Organizational Ambidexterity construct: a conceptual and operational review

Purpose – Competitive pressure and a turbulent environment characterize many industries in a global economy. In such a context, firms should be able to continuously resolve a series of opposite strengths and develop skills in order to realize two different, sometimes opposite, things at the same time (Lewis, 2000). Firms, in other words, need to become ambidextrous, to use both hands with equal skills. Over the last two decades, the topic has been widely debated in literature and the organizational ambidexterity (OA) construct has attracted the growing attention of different literature streams. Such a rapid growth and expansion of the organizational ambidexterity concept has determined different nuances about the meaning and measurement of OA. There is in fact a lack of transparency in the vocabulary it is used, in the conceptualization and operationalization of the OA construct, and in respect of the different phenomena considered. The authors believe that this abuse has contributed to inefficient delivery system changes, construct validity problems in research methodology and tool development. This paper thus aims to analyse how the ambidexterity construct has been used by researchers till now and how it has been conceptualized and operationalized in the extant literature. Design/methodology/approach – In order to reach our objective conducted a literature review by systematically sampling a large number and broad range of papers (more than 100 papers published in major impact factor management Journals between 1976 and 2009) rather than focusing on the consensus list of key papers. We first explored how central the construct is to the paper’s core topic and then we analysed how the construct has been characterized in the most relevant papers. Then, we analysed how the construct has been characterized in the most relevant papers by conducting a content analysis (Rossiter, 2008) of organizational ambidexterity definitions (limited to those papers that make a substantive use of the construct) in order to surface the construct’s key attributes. We also conducted a review of how researchers have operationalized the construct. Value – Organizational ambidexterity is a 20 years old concept that has received a rapid growth of attention in particular in the last five years. The majority of papers published makes use of survey research strategy: such papers are mainly finalised to the demonstration of the “ambidexterity hypothesis” linking the ambidexterity to firm’s performances. Besides these empirical papers built on quantitative analysis, there are few qualitative papers which aim is to analyse the organizational mechanisms and processes at the basis of the construct. As a consequence, OA represents an interesting topic that can open wide spaces for additional researches. On this purpose, it is interesting to notice how the original conceptualization of ambidexterity as a capability has remain widely adopted by researchers, even if some differences in the conceptualization exist caused by the different fields of application and research streams that have approached the theme. Some future research can address the concept of OA as a capability, analysing the organizational mechanisms and practices that foster its development; in this context, longitudinal case studies are recommended as they go in depth in the process that lead to build on an ambidextrous organization. Practical implications – We recommend to develop in depth case studies focused on organizational routines, in order to better delineate OA as a capability. In addition, we suggest that it could be interesting to analyse OA, by adopting the innovation process as level of analysis. Adopting such a perspective can in fact broaden and enrich this stream of the literature, by focusing the attention on practices and elementary actions and by allowing to study organizational ambidexterity involving different nested levels of analysis