Incorporating lower level managers’ reflexivity into organizational ambidexterity

Top management team (hereafter, TMT) leaders perform an important role in allowing organizations to pursue exploration and exploitation. Yet the organizational ambidexterity literature has largely cast their role functionally, prescribing a number of structural, functional and sequential factors that determine the response of lower level managers. We adopt a different perspective, drawing on practice data within an embedded longitudinal case study to examine lower level managers’ reflexive responses to TMT leaders’ behaviours, and the consequences for both lower level mangers as well as TMT leaders’ efforts. In doing so, we offer a theoretical contribution to organizational ambidexterity anchored in micro-sociology that recasts the contextual dynamics in enacting ambidexterity as relationally, and reflexively, constructed, rather than determined by organizational design. Furthermore, we complement but extend scholars’ appreciation of TMT leaders’ role in ambidexterity, by showing how their complex behaviours render different responses from lower level managers.