Ambidextrous culture, contextual ambidexterity and new product innovations: The role of organizational slack and environmental factors

Abstract

Contextual ambidexterity, defined as the simultaneous pursuit of alignment and adaptability at business unit, is linked to several organizational outcomes including improved performance and innovation outcomes. Extant research posits ambidextrous organizational culture as an important enabler to contextual ambidexterity but suffers from a lack of a well‐meaning scale for the same. In addition, there is very little understanding as to how tasking and facilitating environment can be on firms' endeavour for contextual ambidexterity and the outcomes thereof. Therefore, the current piece of research has twin objectives using two separate studies. First, to develop a scale for ambidextrous organizational culture construct and second, to analyse the role played by the external forces (munificence and dynamism) and internal slack resources on the relationships between ambidextrous organizational culture and contextual ambidexterity and between contextual ambidexterity and new product innovation outcomes through an empirical investigation in India. Using structural equation modelling on data from 414 respondents, we found environmental munificence to strengthen the relationships between ambidextrous organizational culture and contextual ambidexterity and between contextual ambidexterity and new product innovation outcomes. On the other hand, environmental dynamism had a dampening impact on these relationships. Our findings also suggest that for low slack organizations, dynamic and unmunificent environments magnified the negative impact on an organisation's ambidexterity efforts and new product innovation outcomes.

Product Innovations through Ambidextrous Organizational Culture with Mediating Effect of Contextual Ambidexterity: An Empirical Study of IT and Telecom Firms

“…Recent studies [17,18] suggested that key ingredients for contextual ambidexterity are pursuance of decentralization and continual innovation. The organizational ambidexterity is the capability on part of the firm to perform not only on incremental quality progresses but also radical innovative developments that explore new avenues and opportunities.…”

A congruence perspective on how human and social capital affect learning capability and innovation

“…With the internal dynamics and external competition from low level to high level, environmental changes will optimize the organizational results and push forward the organizational resources [53]. In other words, on one hand, the high level ambidexterity environment makes some products, processes and administration obsolete and require new ones to be developed [54]. In this case, the surrounding resources (such as knowledge) will be mobilized to promote product and technology innovation through organizational learning and exploring new markets and technologies, to strengthen the knowledge absorptive capacity, to minimize the threat of resource, to increase strategic certainty, to plan accuracy and skill exploration [25][26][27], then to form gain-spiral of organizational resources and to meet organizational needs of intellectual resources [55].…”

How does strategic flexibility affect bricolage: The moderating role of environmental turbulence

“…We adapted construct scale from previous literature and changed the word and sentence to improve the understanding of Chinese informants [6,17,24,36,69]. We apply the seven-point Likert-type scale to measure these items with endpoints of "strongly disagree" and "strongly agree."…”

“…We measure product innovation by utilizing five items to following the previous literature [ 7 , 69 ]. The respondents are required to answer the questions and evaluate the extent to which their firms are successful compared to their major competitors in terms of (1) quickly launching new products into the market, (2) applying advanced production facilities, (3) having a better market response in product modifications and innovations, (4) having state-of-the-art technology in products, (5) being more successful with their product innovations.…”