Organizational Ambidexterity : Balancing Exploitation and Exploration in Organizations

Abstract: Purpose: This paper aims to investigate necessity of ambidexterity for organizations. The main interest of this thesis is to investigate why organizations should be ambidextrous and how organizations can reach ambidexterity under the pressure of limited resources and competitive market condition. Findings: This thesis explored relations and tensions between exploitation and exploration in organizational and individual aspects. Findings in the research show that communication skill of the subunits in the case company need to be strengthened. Subunits need to be independent from each other. However, they should be aware of other subunits’ actions. In this sense, there is need for strong information flow between all units in the case company. Participation of employees and teamwork should be promoted by leaders. This thesis suggests that establishing special subunits for explorative activities would not only leverage explorative processes in the organizations but it would also leverage exploitative activities. This issue causes time management and scheduling problem for the employees and also individuals are distracted by focusing on conflicting dimensions such as explorative and exploitative tasks. Behavioral integrity is one of the most important subjects. Behavioral integrity is the key factor to provide consistency between subunits. Independent subunits with common vision lead firms to ambidexterity. Implications: The implications of this study contribute to achievement of organizational ambidexterity in companies. This thesis was started with introduction to importance of ambidexterity, organizational ambidexterity, exploration and exploitation in case of long and short term organizational performance in sight of knowledge based and managerial perspective. It also explored relations and tensions between these dimensions such as exploration and exploitation in terms of organizational and individual aspects, contextual and structural ambidexterity, social support and performance management, dynamic and ambidextrous capabilities with implication of case study research.