Building Ambidexterity into an Organization Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

For the company to succeed in the long term, you need to learn how to adaptability and alignment - sometimes referred to as a sign of ambidexterity. The concept is tempting, but the evidence suggests that most companies are trying to apply it. The standard approach is to create separate entities for different activities. But separation can also lead to isolation, and many R & D and business development group failed due to lack of linkages with the core business. In an attempt to shed new light on the discussion, the authors develop and explore their concept of contextual ambidexterity, which calls for individual employees to choose between alignment-oriented and adaptation-oriented activities in the context of their day-to-day work. The authors present this as an additional concept of the traditional structural ambidexterity. Through their survey and interview-based research - which took place over three years and involved 4,195 respondents in 41 business units in 10 multinational firms - the authors identify four behavior appears symmetric entities, each of which involves making an independent, adaptive actions of the common the company's goals. They then provide a basis for describing and analyzing organizational contexts that facilitate or impede such behavior. They link the organizational context for ambidexterity and, in turn, ambidexterity to high performance. Finally, the authors describe how companies such as Nokia, Ericsson, Oracle, and Renault have managed to create such high contexts, and they offer managers guidance on how to create them in their own companies. "Hide
by Julian Birkinshaw, Christine Gibson Source: MIT Sloan Management Review 11 pages. Publication Date: July 1, 2004. Prod. #: SMR144-PDF-ENG