The Role of top management teams in enabling and sustaining contextual ambidexterity

The simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation represents a fundamental challenge for organizations facing disruptive innovation. A growing body of literature refers to organizational ambidexterity (OA) as an organization’s ability to pursue both strands simultaneously – to compete efficiently in matured markets through incremental innovations whilst simultaneously deploying the flexibility and agility needed to deliver radical innovation to market quickly. Whilst the consequences of ambidexterity have been well studied, the antecedents to ambidexterity and how it is created in new environments by top management teams (TMT) is understudied. This paper uses a longitudinal case study of multiple business units inside a single setting to make contributions to the OA literature with respect to how contextual ambidexterity is enabled and sustained by TMT leadership, how these specific leadership actions are sequenced over time, and the boundary conditions for mediating the effect of OA on firm performance.