Continuously Hanging by a Thread: Managing Contextually Ambidextrous Organizations

Ambidexterity can be defined as an organization’s ability to simultaneously reconcile exploration and exploitation. In this paper, we focus on contextual ambidexterity, i.e. ambidexterity that derives from the creation of a context that allows employees to pursue exploratory and exploitative activities. Building on empirical case study data from contextually ambidextrous organizations, we describe their idiosyncratic characteristics and we explain how their mode of knowledge transmission between exploratory and exploitative domains, based on fluid project structures, serves to generate competitive advantage. Furthermore, we analyze the role of balancing and orchestrating capabilities for enabling the firm to perform concurrently in exploration and exploitation.