The Social‐Cognitive Underpinnings of Employees’ Ambidextrous Behaviour and the Supportive Role of Group Managers’ Leadership

• Date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12192
• Published date: 01 September 2016

The Social-Cognitive Underpinnings of Employees’

Ambidextrous Behaviour and the Supportive Role of

Group Managers’ Leadership

Olli-Pekka Kauppila and Michiel P. Tempelaar

Aalto University; University of Amsterdam

ABSTRACT Although research on organizational ambidexterity has exploded in the past several

years, the determinants of individual-level ambidexterity have received little scholarly

attention. This is surprising given that management scholars increasingly highlight the benefits

of combining explorative and exploitative activities in individual employees’ work roles. Using

data collected by a two-wave survey of 638 employees nested in 173 groups across 34

organizations, our research demonstrates that both psychological factors and leadership

predict employees’ ambidextrous behaviour. Our results demonstrate that general self-efficacy

positively predicts ambidextrous behaviour through learning orientation. In addition, we show

that employees exhibit higher ambidexterity when their group managers demonstrate

paradoxical leadership; that is, a leadership style that couples strong managerial support with

high performance expectations. Paradoxical leadership also moderates the relationship

between learning orientation and individual ambidexterity such that employees’ ambidextrous

behaviour is highest when paradoxical leadership and employee learning orientation are

simultaneously at high levels.

Keywords: individual ambidexterity, general self-efficacy, learning orientation, paradoxical

leadership, social-cognitive theory

INTRODUCTION

The past two decades have witnessed an enormous interest in theory and research on

organizational ambidexterity – that is, the ability to explore new opportunities while

exploiting existing competencies (Cao et al. 2009; Tushman and O’Reilly, 1996). Ambi-

dexterity can manifest itself at any organizational level, ranging from the organization’s

macro-level down to the level of individual employees (Raisch et al., 2009; Turner et al.,

2013). At the individual level, ambidexterity is the extent to which individuals combine

Address for reprints: Olli-Pekka Kauppila, Department of Management Studies, School of Business, Aalto

University, P.O. Box 21230, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland (olli-pekka.kauppila@aalto.fi).

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C2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 53:6 September 2016

doi: 10.1111/joms.12192

the exploration of new competence areas with the exploitation of existing competences

in their work role (Bledow et al., 2009; Mom et al., 2009). Individual-level ambidexterity

is not only a possible level at which organizations can reconcile exploration and exploi-

tation (Adler et al., 1999; Miron-Spektor et al., 2011) but is also necessary for combining

and gaining synergies between explorative and exploitative activities at higher organiza-

tional levels. Ambidexterity at all organizational levels requires the agency and discre-

tion of ambidextrous individuals – be they all employees (Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004)

or a small group of managers (Tushman and O’Reilly, 1996) – to allocate resources and

manage the cross-fertilization between explorative and exploitative activities (Jansen

et al., 2008; Rogan and Mors, 2014; Turner et al., 2013).

The relevance of individual ambidexterity has also been emphasized beyond ambi-

dexterity research. Scholars of work design and motivation have noted that contempo-

rary work roles require individuals to attend to increasingly diverse tasks (Griffin et al.,

2007) and to take personal initiative in developing and pursuing their work goals (Frese

and Fay, 2001). These researchers have pleaded for job roles involving ambidextrous

behaviours to make jobs more interesting and motivating for employees (Adler et al.,

1999). According to Parker (2014), ambidexterity is an important form of enrichment

for employees in mundane jobs because the combination of explorative and exploitative

tasks makes the work more meaningful. In this vein, Birkinshaw and Gupta (2013, p.

294) maintained that ‘... even the most ordinary production worker or call center

worker faces some version of the ambidexterity dilemma: How much of my time should

I spend exploiting my basic skills for the benefit of the organization, and how much

should I try to develop new skills and/or help the organization in creative ways?’ More-

over, in the organizational creativity literature, Miron-Spektor et al. (2011) found that

employees who combine exploration and exploitation are more creative than those that

only explore because the integration of contradictory demands prevents employees from

falling back on their conventional lines of thought. Good and Michel (2013) consistently

showed that ambidextrous behaviour is associated with higher performance in dynami-

cally changing tasks.

Although the importance of individual ambidexterity is widely recognized, very little

research has been devoted to explaining ambidexterity at the individual level of analysis

(Lavie et al., 2010; Raisch et al., 2009). Most ambidexterity studies have adopted a

macro perspective, thus providing us with an extensive understanding of the processes,

structures, and systems that support the firm-level ability to pursue exploration and

exploitation simultaneously (see Raisch and Birkinshaw, 2008 for a review). The heavy

emphasis on the macro level has left ambidexterity theory with an incomplete under-

standing of how an organization’s members can deal with contradictory demands and

integrate exploration and exploitation. To address this void, this study seeks to advance

the understanding of individual ambidexterity by developing and testing a theoretical

model of the psychological mechanisms underlying employees’ ambidextrous behaviour.

Drawing from the social cognitive theory (Chen et al., 2000; Judge et al., 1999), we

hypothesize that general self-efficacy (GSE) is a key psychological trait that underpins

individuals’ ambidextrous behaviour. We further apply related theories on achievement

motivation (Dragoni, 2005; Dweck and Leggett, 1988) to hypothesize that learning ori-

entation, defined as an individual’s dedication to the development of his or her

1020 O.-P. Kauppila and M. P. Tempelaar

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C2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies