Organisational ambidexterity constructs during the implementation of digital transfromation strategies

Abstract

How to strategically balance exploration and exploitation activities inside an organization is the greatest difficulty faced by leaders during the implementation of adaptive strategies. Exploration and exploitation are driven by opposing market and regulatory factors as well as diverse organizational learning capabilities. To date, organisational ambidexterity literature has focused primarily on how businesses balance their contradictory demands, paying particular attention to the drivers of ambidexterity and how human resource systems, senior leadership team attributes, contextual elements, and organisational structures contribute to the attempt at balancing explorative and exploitative activities. The mechanisms used to balance competing demands during the strategy implementation process have not been linked to adaptive strategy implementations such as digital transformation. This study contribute to the development of an integrated framework for adaptive strategy implementation by exploring the link between organisational ambidexterity and adaptive strategy execution.

This exploratory study, utilised qualitative research methods to collect new insights in order to fully understand the organisational ambidexterity constructs selected during the implementation of a digital transformation strategy. Further to this, the study identified the factors that influenced the selection of the selected constructs of ambidexterity. Senior leaders in the process of executing their digital transformation strategies in traditional pre-digital businesses were the subjects of twelve semi-structured, in-depth interviews.

This research study found that a link exists between organisational ambidexterity and the execution of an adaptive strategy like digital transformation