Background: An organization cannot only rely on how they have been accustomed to doing things in the past, rather they have to be willing to change and adapt in order to be successful in the present as well as the future by achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage. The ability to have a successful core business, be profitable today and also be able to predict future possibilities is a key for organizations that aim at being successful in the long term. Ambidexterity deals with these issues. An ambidextrous organization aims to balance the capability to exploit the present and exploring the future simultaneously. Therefore, it is an essential factor for the long term survival of firms. Aim: The purpose of this thesis is to study ambidexterity with regard to SMEs in the service sector. Completion: This study is based on a qualitative research which is conducted as a single case study on Mediakonsulterna as a firm. Conclusions: The study shows that ambidexterity can be applied in a SME in the service sector. Furthermore, there are different approaches as to how ambidexterity can be applied as discussed in this study. More specifically, the study concludes that a contextual approach to ambidexterity is viable when firms lack the resources and size for implementing ambidexterity through structural measures. This means that a SME in the service sector can conduct ambidexterity on an individual level throughout the company rather than relying on a structural division of separate units. In order to apply ambidexterity, SMEs rely to a large amount on individuals to balance the different activities such as exploitation and exploration

Drawing on studies of strategic dynamics and organizational change, this thesis proposes four approaches to balancing exploration and exploitation over time: Specialist, Cyclical, Irregular, and Regular. Various approaches to ambidexterity may be more effective under different environment conditions, and performance may vary along with: 1) varying types of rule change environments, 2) varying levels of competitive intensity among firms, 3) reactive versus proactive timing heuristics, and 4) varying levels of product diversification. Several hypotheses are developed and confirmed using qualitative field research and agent-based modeling. Results indicated that strategic leaders should balance their exploration and exploitation with Regular ambidexterity as their environments become dominated by competence enhancing innovation. Conversely, firms should temporally shift their balance of exploration and exploitation when competence-destroying changes dominate. In a balanced environment, Irregular ambidexterity performs best. These finding are especially relevant in highly competitive contexts. Also, proactive switching increases performance more than reactive switching, whereas diversification reduces the performance of sequential heuristics.

Drawing on studies of strategic dynamics and organizational change, this thesis proposes four approaches to balancing exploration and exploitation over time: Specialist, Cyclical, Irregular, and Regular. Various approaches to ambidexterity may be more effective under different environment conditions, and performance may vary along with: 1) varying types of rule change environments, 2) varying levels of competitive intensity among firms, 3) reactive versus proactive timing heuristics, and 4) varying levels of product diversification. Several hypotheses are developed and confirmed using qualitative field research and agent-based modeling. Results indicated that strategic leaders should balance their exploration and exploitation with Regular ambidexterity as their environments become dominated by competence enhancing innovation. Conversely, firms should temporally shift their balance of exploration and exploitation when competence-destroying changes dominate. In a balanced environment, Irregular ambidexterity performs best. These finding are especially relevant in highly competitive contexts. Also, proactive switching increases performance more than reactive switching, whereas diversification reduces the performance of sequential heuristics.

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Background: Since quick change is one of the most distinguishing qualities of today's market, organizations must be able to cope with it and match markets by keeping up with new market trends and wants, as well as adapting to changes in market features. This can be achieved by pursuing both exploration and exploitation to ensure success in the short and long term. Since this is the case, it is vital that companies find the right balance between operation and innovation to be able to exploit present opportunities and explore future directions. Purpose: This research aims to study the role of ambidexterity in achieving the desired balance in different industries. Every organization is unique, and companies differ from each other in many ways such as; work system, organizational structure, work philosophy and size. This study discussed the issue of balancing innovation and operation, to evaluate the process of choosing the right ambidextrous approach to be followed by different organizations across different industries. Method: Multiple case study was used. Data collected had both primary and secondary sources where the primary sources were collected through semi-structured interviews and the secondary sources were archives and reports. Grounded analysis was used in the analysis process to conclude the theory. Conclusion: The research results showed that when organizations achieve ambidexterity by following one of the ambidexterity approaches, the choice of the right approach depends on certain factors on different levels that need to be considered, and the four tensions of ambidexterity differ from one approach to another. Hence, the tensions should be verified and handled in relevance to the followed ambidexterity approach.

Background: Exploring the ambidexterity literature in the context of agile software development organizations from the perspective of how the organizational characteristics that result from the application of agile methods affect the achievement of ambidexterity Aim: To gain insight into how agile software development organizations achieve ambidexterity. Methodology: How agile software development organizations achieve ambidexterity was studied through a multiple case study where the total of four case projects in two different organizations were examined. Findings: This study indicated how the characteristics of agile software development organizations have an essential role in how ambidexterity is achieved in these organizations.

Digital disruptions are changing the healthcare ecosystem, requiring organizations to rethink IT strategies and develop new IT competencies. This study focuses on the exploitation and exploration tension that managers face within an IT organization of a global pharmaceutical company, and their response to the related environmental exigencies in healthcare. Dynamic capability theory (DC) provides the overall framing, while ambidexterity provides an understanding of top management’s response to the exploit–explore tensions that arise. This engaged scholarship longitudinal case study takes a shifting stories methodological approach to elicit participants’ reflections and interpretations of significant events, including their own role in evolving the ambidextrous posture of the IT organization. Through rich description stories, process related decisions have been revealed, and have provided an understanding into organizational reconfiguration of IT resources. Subsequently, this resulted in a situated grounded model for understanding DC and OA for this case. Practical insights are offered on how dynamic capability theory could be applied for IT management to be smarter at becoming more ambidextrous.

This study is motivated by the growing influence in organisational research on the perspective of culture as a toolkit of resources from which individuals can draw on to develop strategies of action. Research has established that ambidextrous organisations succeed both in incremental and discontinuous innovation. However, there remains a scarcity of study on how managers orchestrate ambidexterity. This thesis extends the ambidexterity research by investigating how managers orchestrate ambidextrous strategies and how these strategies are shaped by elements of the organisational culture in high technology firms. An interpretive case study approach was used to achieve the aims of the study. Focusing on two engineering projects, 55 interviews were conducted alongside documentary reviews and participant observation for 6 months at Brush Electrical Machines Ltd, UK. Analysis of the findings is conducted using thematic analysis to identify common themes and NVivo was used to draw out patterns until relationships among the emerging themes became clearer. The thesis makes important contributions to the organisational ambidexterity literature by providing useful empirically-driven insights and deconstructing the roles of middle managers in facilitating ambidexterity. The findings of the research indicate that most of the middle managers demonstrated ambidextrous behaviours. These middle level managers enabled their behaviours through diverse cultural resources selected from the organisation s cultural toolkit. Thus, important contributions are made to the literature on organisational culture, specifically on the toolkit perspectives. The thesis takes the perspective that organisational culture should be viewed as heterogeneous and not homogeneous. The study concludes by suggesting that middle management ambidextrous behaviours shaped by cultural resources may be vital for the realisation of improved or sustained competitiveness in organisations.

In this thesis I propose that the literature on ambidexterity does not fully explore the detailed practices by which organisations and managers may achieve both exploitation and exploration. A systematic review identifies that studies have focused principally at the organisation-level, and there is a lack of both empirical and theoretical work at the micro-level of analysis highlighting how ambidexterity may be achieved in practical, complex, working structures. The research addresses these micro-mechanisms in the context of the management of projects, a suitable area in that it can be considered as using defined processes together with the flexibility to overcome particular issues that arise. The contribution of the thesis is that it presents an insight into the management of ambidexterity in such an environment, and identifies how multiple knowledge resources are utilised, together with the underlying managerial practices. The level of analysis is the project (specifically, IT-services projects in a major multinational organisation), using the manager as the unit of analysis. The research question is ‘How is ambidexterity achieved at the level of the project?’ This is an opportunity to explore a practical as well as a theoretical gap, in an increasingly important area of business operations. The first stage of the research examines the managerial role in terms of intellectual capital, using a variety of projects. This shows that the sub-components of IC (human, social and organisational/project capital) can each be understood as having co-existing, orthogonal, exploitative and exploratory elements, an important extension of existing theory. The forms of intellectual capital are interwoven not only with each other, but also with the processes of exploitation and exploration, and to conceive of them as separate is an insufficient theorisation. The findings from the qualitative approach are used to investigate the duality of these concepts and bring greater clarity to our understanding of their operationalisation. .This is followed by eight case studies, each using between three and five managerial respondents, together with project data, used to develop a more fine-grained understanding of ambidexterity in a wide range of industrial settings. This shows different managerial configurations (including ‘distributed’ and ‘point’ ambidexterity – an addition to current theory), together with five key managerial practices to enable project-level ambidexterity, identified in the context of project complexity, critical events and constraints.

High globalization of economy has led companies into a business environment in which the changes are increasingly complex and faster. In order to survive even succeed over the long term, the modern enterprises must confront reality in real time and predict possibility. In the 1990s, the theory of dynamic capability arose for responding the rapid changes in market conditions. Many scholars¡¦ researches found that the learning of organization, management models and organizational ambidexterity are the factors to affect the dynamic capability of enterprise. And the organizational ambidexterity can enhance organizational strength of controlling new knowledge and informational diversity. The purpose of this research is to explore the relationships among self-directed learning, organizational ambidexterity and dynamic capability of enterprise. Research is conducted using survey data collection. Samples are from engineers, administrators, specialists, first-line and midlevel managers in enterprises. Via electronic and paper questionnaires, the numbers of distributed questionnaire is 557, effective questionnaire is 230, and the rate of effective questionnaire is 41.3%. The analysis results show that there are significantly parallel relationships among self-directed learning, organizational ambidexterity and dynamic capability of enterprise. For enterprise management, strengthening employees¡¦ self-directed learning and building up a high organizational ambidexterity are useful to enhance the dynamic capability of enterprise.