Organizational ambidexterity, defined as an organization's ability to be aligned and efficient in its management of today's business demands while simultaneously being adaptive to changes in the environment, has gained increasing interest in recent years. In this article, the authors review various literature streams to develop a comprehensive model that covers research into the antecedents, moderators, and outcomes of organizational ambidexterity. They indicate gaps within and across different research domains and point to important avenues for future research.
Profitable growth requires organizations to simultaneously increase the efficiency of their current operations and to develop and launch innovative products to ensure future growth. This requires an organizational design that pursues seemingly contradictory demands at the same time: bureaucratic structures to ensure efficiency and organic structures to allow for innovation and growth. Unfortunately, there is still little known about how organizational structures address the paradox between efficiency and innovation. In this paper, four alternative design paths are presented that enable organizations to balance the conflicting organizational requirements of profitable growth. The paper draws upon longitudinal case studies and empirical findings from a research program currently underway at the University of St. Gallen's Center for Organizational Excellence (CORE).
The foremost activity as far as strategy theory is concerned, has always been the analysis of factors underlying firm success. While significant insights have been gained, the field is still highly fragmented, often oversimplifies the interrelation between determinants, and remains inherently static in its approach. In this study we establish three models to address these limitations. The integrated model combines the most relevant determinants from competing perspectives into a single model. The complex model captures the most relevant interrelations between these determinants. The evolutionary model encompasses the evolution of these determinants over time. All three models were validated in a field study of the global media industries. The combined results provide a state-of-the-art view of the factors and effects underlying firm performance.
UNTERNEHMENSKRISEN: Scheitern erfolgreiche Unternehmen, steckt dahinter meist dieselbe Logik. Eine empirische Studie enthüllt die zentralen Fehler und zeigt auf, wie sich Unternehmen wirkungsvoll schützen können.
La crise des entreprises : Existe-t-il une logique commune à l'échec d'entreprises prospères ? Cette étude empirique, dévoile des défaillances vitales dans la gestion de ces entreprises et indique comment les compagnies peuvent se protéger efficacement contre ces crises.
Companies strive for profitable growth in their quest to create superior returns for their shareholders. Profitable growth requires an organizational design that pursues seemingly contradictory demands: mechanistic structures to ensure the efficient exploitation of existing capabilities, and organic structures to enable the exploration of new growth opportunities. Researchers have suggested a range of ‘balanced' structural concepts to reconcile these conflicting requirements at the corporate level. The solutions include temporarily cycling through different structures (temporal separation), creating differentiated units (structural separation), and enabling employees to move back and forth between different structures (parallel structures). While theoretical concepts have been presented for balanced structures, much less is known about how organizations deploy and execute these solutions.
In this article, data from an inductive study of six leading Central European companies are used to explore the specific conditions under which different structural solutions were adopted, the strategies deployed to execute these solutions, and the learning outcomes that resulted from their implementation. The organizations observed in this study used the three balanced design options as complementary rather than mutually exclusive solutions. The solutions were deployed in different contexts and contributed to different learning outcomes. While the solutions all combined exploitation and exploration activities to some extent, each solution addressed different dimensions of these learning processes. The process model of balanced structural designs, presented in this article, provides insights into the structural solutions that may be most appropriate given the requirements of specific situations. Four general design rules are presented to support practitioners in the successful execution of balanced structures.
This paper investigates factors affecting the effectiveness of knowledge sharing in globally dispersed expert groups in a professional service MNC. We specifically focus on possible moderating effects of managerial involvement on the relationships of dispersion and trust with the individual satisfaction with knowledge sharing within such groups. We test our hypotheses in the context of a large multinational software company. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how knowledge is shared in globally dispersed settings in the MNC and challenges traditional assumptions on the appropriate level of analysis in studies of knowledge flows within MNCs.
