Explaining the Interaction Between Leader Ambidextrous Behavior, Employee Ambidexterity, and Organizational Ambidexterity

Introduction

Leadership is one of the most important prophets that will enable organizations to identify and implement strategies that make sense for the future and to benefit from existing competencies and to differentiate organizations in this context. Leadership has been recognized as one of the most effective predictors of employee innovation, organizational development, and learning (Alghamdi, 2018). From this perspective, there are changes in various individual and organizational outputs with the leaders who constitute a key factor in the qualification, differentiation and final success of the business and their styles and behaviors according to their characteristics. Leadership behaviors that help organizations to make themselves ambidextrous can also be categorized mainly as task-oriented, relationship-oriented, change-oriented, and external behaviors (Yukl, 2012).

Literature review depicts that there has been an intense interest in organizational ambidexterity theory and respective researches in this particular area especially from 2000's onwards. At first sight, the main assertion thereby is the necessity to operate by interacting organizations' capacities simultaneously on exploiting existing competencies and developing exploratory research on new competencies and opportunities for long-term life and success (Alghamdi, 2018:1). In a constantly changing and dynamic environment, organizations struggle to fit in the interests of all stakeholder groups they are in for survival. Change adaptation strategies are vital in terms of transforming opportunities by observing the fluctuations in the market, the environmental threats and other stakeholders in the competition with content and methods. Organizational theory (relying on the proven facts of this fieldwork) claims that successful organizations in dynamic environments are already harmonious and effective while being adaptable to future changes; thus ambidextrous (Cao et al., 2009). In this direction, overcoming all structural, contextual, or behavioral challenges will be possible within the organizations which can both improve their current positions and adapt to change (Duncan, 1976), along with ambidextrous leaders who represent these organizations (Rosing et. al., 2011) and with ambidextrous human resources whose strategies are effective in the functional context (Alghamdi, 2018).

In particular, the conceptual examination of organizational ambidexterity and the curiosity of accessing ambidexterity capacity are still a research topic of growing interest (Yu et al., 2017: 2). When theoretical foundations of the concept are examined, it can be observed that the factors leading to the dimension of ambidexterity of an organization during the studies carried out on a day-to-day basis are mainly delineated under three headings. The structural-based factor is that the establishment of autonomous and structurally separated sub-units in relation to different people, structures and processes will benefit organizational ambidexterity (synchronicity) (Raisch and Birkinshaw, 2008; O'Reilly and Tushman, 2004). The contextual/content-based factor advocates the view that ambidexterity can be achieved by establishing a set of processes or systems that encourage individuals to make their own decisions about how they divide their time between conformable and adaptable contradictory requests (Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004: 210). It must be noted that both of these dimensions take into account organizational factors (e.g., organizational structure, culture) to facilitate synchronicity (Agostini et al., 2016). Finally, the third factor of leadership-oriented, in other words, the behavioral ambidexterity perspective claims that managers/entrepreneurs/leaders play an important role in the development of organizational ambidexterity, and the characteristics of managers/entrepreneurs/leaders have important influences on organizational ambidexterity (Yu et al., 2017: 3). In this context, ambidexterity’s thoroughly impact on organization is of great importance in each of organizational, team and individual level. It has been also emphasized that ambidexterity requires employees to internalize and to implement strategies in order to exploit and explore in equal amounts and at the same time. At the individual level, ambidexterity is not only a possible level that can compensate for both exploration and exploitation but it is also necessary to combine synergy and create interaction between discovery and exploitation activities at a higher organizational level (Alghamdi, 2018: 2).