Recent research indicates that interorganizational partnerships represent a potentially important resource for the development of ambidexterity. However, little is known about how a firm's ambidexterity evolves from external partnership resources. This article reports an in-depth field investigation of a firm that has successfully created ambidexterity by employing its interorganizational exploration and exploitation partnerships. In particular, the article focuses on three innovation processes within this firm. The findings underscore the importance of a firm's ambidextrous organizational context, enabling it to reap the distinct benefits of both exploration and exploitation partnerships. Moreover, the findings reveal the specific mechanisms through which the firm integrated and balanced exploration and exploitation within its organization. Overall, this article demonstrates how a firm can build and manage an organizational context that internally balances exploration and exploitation while augmenting both activities through structurally separate interorganizational partnerships.

Although research on organizational ambidexterity has exploded in the past several years, the determinants of individual-level ambidexterity have received little scholarly attention. This is surprising given that management scholars increasingly highlight the benefits of combining explorative and exploitative activities in individual employees' work roles. Using data collected by a two-wave survey of 638 employees nested in 173 groups across 34 organizations, our research demonstrates that both psychological factors and leadership predict employees' ambidextrous behaviour. Our results demonstrate that general self-efficacy positively predicts ambidextrous behaviour through learning orientation. In addition, we show that employees exhibit higher ambidexterity when their group managers demonstrate paradoxical leadership; that is, a leadership style that couples strong managerial support with high performance expectations. Paradoxical leadership also moderates the relationship between learning orientation and individual ambidexterity such that employees' ambidextrous behaviour is highest when paradoxical leadership and employee learning orientation are simultaneously at high levels.

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Although prior research generally holds that role clarity is affected by both individual characteristics and organizational contexts, current conceptual or empirical models do not reflect the multilevel nature of these antecedents. A more complete understanding of how role clarity emanates from different organizational levels is necessary to help prevent poor job performance and other harmful consequences of ambiguous role expectations. To address this, I begin this research by investigating the effects of internal work locus of control, general self‐efficacy, and leader–member exchange on role clarity. With respect to the cross‐level effects, I focus on the roles of a manager's control style and the organization's strategy‐making pattern. Analyses of a multi‐industry, multilevel dataset collected from 724 employees and 124 managers in 25 organizations in Finland suggest that all of the individual‐level independent variables and a deliberate strategy‐making pattern improve role clarity. However, a deliberate strategy‐making pattern negatively moderates the relationship between general self‐efficacy and role clarity. Finally, even though an outcome‐based control system causes role ambiguity among employees in most functional areas, it may be an effective driver of role clarity among employees in sales jobs.

The fundamental premise of the leader–member exchange (LMX) theory is that leaders’ relationships with their followers vary in quality. Although LMX differentiation (i.e., within‐group variation in the quality of LMX) is generally considered a sound leadership practice, its effects on group members’ work outcomes remain poorly understood. Drawing on LMX and upper echelons theories, this study suggests that employees’ reactions to LMX differentiation depend on the personal LMX status of employees and the characteristics of the organizational context. Analyses of multilevel data collected from 502 employees organized into 135 work groups in 34 firms show that the impact of LMX differentiation on work outcomes is more positive (or less negative) for employees with lower rather than higher LMX. The findings highlight the importance of organizational boundary conditions for these interactions: The negative moderation by one's own LMX status is stronger when top managers decentralize responsibilities to lower hierarchical levels and weaker when top managers impose a shared vision to guide the organization.