Developing and Leading Ambidextrous Teams: A Team-Centric Framework of Ambidexterity in Volatile Environments

ABSTRACT

To meet the adaptive challenges of rapidly changing environments, leaders of organizational teams and team-based entities can leverage the powerful dynamic capabilities of ambidexterity to achieve sustainable innovation and longterm adaptation. This conceptual inquiry focuses on the special characteristics of teams and teamwork, and how those can afford dynamic potential for achieving ambidexterity. Teams intrinsically function dynamically as integrative adaptive systems. Teams hold unique advantages for sensing and seizing new opportunities, and for reallocating taskwork and reconfiguring resources. Such advantages enable teams to more effectively align and balance exploration and exploitation for sustained innovation and successful adaptation. This inquiry draws from existing studies of dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity, and integrates that research with the well-established literature on teams and teamwork. This study examines the key processes and dynamics of team ambidexterity. The study synthesizes, and proposes a systems model that indicates team-centric mechanisms and dynamic linkages by which ambidexterity can operate as dynamic capabilities within teams. The analysis and model add to the development of organizational change theory and orients future studies of ambidexterity at meso level. This inquiry also benefits organizational leaders by providing valuable insights and practical tools for developing, leading, and supporting teams that can perform effectively under turbulent conditions.

MAD statement

Ambidexterity achieved through organizational teams represents dynamic potential for sustainable innovation, longterm adaptation and competitive advantage in response to rapidly changing conditions. This inquiry addresses how leaders of teams and team-based structures can enable key mechanisms and linkages for developing and engaging ambidexterity that operates as dynamic capabilities at team level. The study especially emphasizes the importance of specific mechanisms and linkages that specially characterize teams as complex adaptive systems. This inquiry suggests how organizational leaders in volatile environments can engage ambidextrous teams to leverage valuable potential for more empowered change processes, and more effective innovation and adaptation.

KEYWORDS:

• team ambidexterity
• dynamic capabilities
• innovation
• environmental adaptation
• human resource management
• team leadership

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin P. Dean

Benjamin P. Dean earned a PhD in organizational leadership, as well as a Juris Doctorate and a post-doctorate degree in law. He is an associate professor of management and a former department head at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. Before joining a university faculty, he gained international experience in various public and private sector organizations and teams. He is a licensed attorney and holds senior professional certifications in human resource management. His published journal articles and textbook chapters have focused on organizations, leadership, law, and online education.