Individual ambidexterity: the duality of exploration and exploitation and its relationship with innovative performance

ABSTRACT

Organizational ambidexterity has been established as an important antecedent of organizational innovation and performance. Recently, researchers have started to argue that ambidexterity is not only essential at the organizational, but also at the individual level. Thus, to be innovative, individuals need to engage in both explorative and exploitative behaviours. However, questions remain regarding the optimal balance of explorative and exploitative behaviours and how ambidexterity can be operationalized. At the organizational level, most empirical research utilized either the difference between, or the product of, exploration and exploitation. In this article, we criticize these approaches on conceptual and methodological grounds and argue for an alternative operationalization of ambidexterity: polynomial regression and response surface methodology. In two diary studies with daily and weekly data, we demonstrate the advantages of this approach. We discuss implications for ambidexterity research and innovation practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Ambidexterity
• Exploration
• Exploitation
• Innovation
• Polynomial regression

Acknowledgements

We thank Alecia Robinson and Lena Tobaben for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.