Hybrid Ambidexterity: How the Environment Shapes Incumbents’ Use of Structural and Contextual Approaches
通过对德国四大电力公司的纵向案例研究，发现环境机会的感知促使企业采用结构性或情境性双元性，并在机会多且不确定时结合两者形成混合双元性，挑战了将二者视为二分法的传统观点。
According to the literature on ambidexterity, organizations can use structural or contextual approaches to simultaneously explore novel opportunities and exploit existing ones. So far, however, we know very little about what induces organizations to focus on structural versus contextual ambidexterity, or how they combine the two approaches to maximize organizational learning. To shed more light on these questions, we investigate how the environment shapes a firm’s use of structural and contextual ambidexterity. Drawing on a comparative, longitudinal case study of the four largest electric utility companies in Germany, we show that firms focused on structural ambidexterity whenever they perceived emerging opportunities in the environment as requiring organizational culture and capabilities fundamentally different from their own. Contextual ambidexterity, on the other hand, became particularly important when opportunities in the environment were both numerous and uncertain, requiring the organization to leverage the distributed attention and expertise of its frontline employees. We show that environments characterized by opportunities that are numerous/uncertain and require novel culture and capabilities lead organizations to invest in initiatives that combine elements of both structural and contextual ambidexterity—an approach we label hybrid ambidexterity. Our theory framework synthesizes and complements existing work that has started to investigate the antecedents of structural versus contextual ambidexterity. We challenge the prevailing understanding of contextual and structural ambidexterity as dichotomous categories and reconceptualize them as two ends of a continuum. In addition, we provide initial evidence that firms’ ambidexterity approaches are influenced by managers’ perceptions of capabilities and opportunities.