Leadership succession planning for today’s digital transformation economy: Key factors to build for competency and innovation

Digital transformation is rapidly changing the competitive landscape and the war on talent for today’s organizations. As part of this economy, organizations and their HR units must continuously reevaluate leadership structures and practices that exploit core competencies while allowing for innovation (i.e., leadership ambidexterity) and incorporate big data with predictive analytics. In this vein, understanding how HR executives can create better solutions around this problem remains sparse. Specifically, what frameworks can HR executives apply to identify potential alignment failures in leadership succession planning in light of newer emerging markets? What internal decision-making traps need to be recognized? Finally, what specific forms of data and evidence must test these plans for relevance and recharge and renew the talent-to-strategy pipeline? In this article, we examine these questions by reviewing the gaps in the literature and identifying through our four-step model how organizations can incorporate ambidexterity-building as a leadership succession planning practice.     

Connecting strategic orientation,innovation strategy,and corporate sustainability: A model for sustainable development through stakeholder engagement

This paper aims to enhance our understanding of the relationship between organizations' strategic orientation (i.e., instrumental, equidistant, and stewardship) and their innovational strategy (i.e., organizational ambidexterity and open innovation), and this relationship's influence on their sustainability performance. We expected organizations' strategic orientation to influence their innovational strategy and exhibit better corporate sustainability. We focused on 12 different multinational organizations in the Eurozone and found that inbound open innovation acts as a driver for corporate sustainability while simultaneously positively enabling organizations to pursue both financial and social initiatives. After suggesting open innovation as a new corporate sustainability antecedent, we only found empirical evidence of inbound open innovation. However, we would suggest that if organizations incorporated outbound open innovation in their strategy, they could likely improve their corporate sustainability. Also, we found that achieving an equidistant or stewardship orientation paves the way for sustainability to become an integral part of an organization's innovational culture and actualizes the organization's strategic behavior. Our findings further contribute to a deeper understanding of organizations' characteristics as their sustainability commitment grows and as they move from an instrumental to a stewardship orientation and implement an open innovational strategy.     

How an international ambidexterity strategy can address the paradox perspective on corporate sustainability: Evidence from Chinese emerging market multinationals

Corporate sustainability (CS) is receiving considerable attention from emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs), playing an important role in the globalized market. However, theoretical and empirical knowledge about how EMNEs address CS is still scant, and the relationship between internationalization and CS has not been widely explored. This study aims to fill this gap, evaluating the relationship between an international ambidexterity strategy and CS in EMNEs, which highlighted the paradox perspective. Then we develop three hypotheses in which we argue how the dynamic capabilities underpinning international ambidexterity could be considered a driver of CS in EMNEs. We test the developed hypotheses against data from 300 Chinese EMNEs obtained by a survey. Our results contribute to shape ambidextrous international strategies and to consider CS as a springboard for the strategic intent to systematically and recursively outperform global competition. Testing a measurement scale of international ambidexterity, we suggest structural ambidexterity as a strategic option of internationalization that allows the achievement of economic, social, and environmental sustainability objectives.     

The micro-foundations of strategic ambidexterity: Chinese cross-border M&As,Mid-View thinking and integration management

Chinese cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) display several unique properties in relation to the ways in which their international business operations are organised and managed. Their seemingly puzzling ‘light-touch’ integration approach can be significantly understood from a strategic ambidexterity perspective: on the one hand, the ‘light-touch’ enables the exploitation of the targets’ existing knowledge bases; on the other hand, elements of the ‘light-touch’ facilitate the exploration of the new knowledge arising from the collaboration between targets and acquirers. However, an important theoretical gap remains: why do Chinese companies deploy such a strategic ambidexterity approach in their post-acquisition integrations? This paper aims to fill this gap by proposing Mid-View thinking as a micro-foundation of strategic ambidexterity in integration management from a cultural and philosophical perspective. To illuminate our conceptualization and argument, we conducted qualitative in-depth interviews with CEOs/high-level managers of acquired German companies. Communication approach and organizational control—as two critical aspects in integration management—reveal how Mid-View thinking can serve as a micro-foundation of strategic ambidexterity. We conclude this paper by presenting its theoretical contributions, managerial implications, and future research directions.     

The Competitive Advantage of Collaboration – Throwing New Light on The Nordic Model

ABSTRACT

In one of the most influential contributions to modern political economy, Hall and Soskice have launched a distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘coordinated’ market economies, placing the Nordic countries firmly in the latter category. We argue that, while the H&S distinction may serve classificatory purposes, seeing the Nordic model in terms of ‘coordinated capitalism’ blurs the distinctive features of the Nordic countries’ success as productive and fair economies. We contend that the central formula behind this success lies in what we call the Nordic model’s ambidexterity – the capacity to combine collaborative and competitive elements and skilfully navigate between them. Using an interdisciplinary perspective (inspired by organisation theory, cultural semiotics and evolutionary analysis), we provide a conceptual basis for reinterpreting the Nordic Model as an ambidextrous combination of culturally rooted, collaborative strategies that are subsequently competitively exposed. The article illustrates the workings of this ambidexterity in three societal domains: work life (including female participation), resource management – illustrated by the Norwegian petro-economy – and international business management and regulation with a focus on CSR. In each case we will show how collaboration is intertwined with pragmatic competitive exposure, yielding high productivity, high welfare, as well as fair income and wealth distribution.     

Unpacking the effect of strategic ambidexterity on performance: A cross-country comparison of MMNEs developing product-service innovation

This study tests whether strategic ambidexterity improves Product-service innovation (PSI) outcomes for manufacturing multinational enterprises (MMNEs). It also tests successful pathways to develop PSI properly by organizing exploitation and exploration activities. Data from a survey of 338 MMNEs are analysed through Structural Equations Modelling. The sample contains firms from five world regions, including emerging economies. This approach enables contrast to determine cross-country heterogeneity in PSI outcomes. The results show that, to maximise firm performance, PSI must be developed through a sequential Exploitation-Exploration pathway. Although this optimal sequence is consistent across all world regions (except Japan), noticeable contextual differences emerge in the relative importance of exploration and exploitation to firm performance. Our findings show that exploitation (i.e., cost efficiency through PSI design) and exploration (i.e., PSI R&D) capabilities are equally important in emerging economies.     

A Socio‐Psychological Perspective on Team Ambidexterity: The Contingency Role of Supportive Leadership Behaviours

In addressing the notion of team ambidexterity, we propose that socio‐psychological factors (i.e., team cohesion and team efficacy) may help team members to resolve paradoxical challenges and to combine exploratory and exploitative learning efforts. In addition, we theorize that senior executives may play an important role in facilitating the emergence of ambidexterity at lower hierarchical levels. In doing so, we develop a multilevel contingency framework and propose that the effectiveness of teams to achieve ambidexterity is contingent upon supportive leadership behaviours at the organizational‐level. Using multilevel, multisource, and temporally separated data on 87 teams within 37 high‐tech and pharmaceutical firms, we not only reveal how team cohesion and efficacy may matter for the emergence of team ambidexterity but also show that the effectiveness of supportive leadership behaviours from senior executives varies across cohesive and efficacious teams.     

Dynamic ambidexterity: How innovators manage exploration and exploitation

Firms must excel at both exploration and exploitation to ensure long-term survival and prosperity. However, firms often have difficulties in doing so because they have to accommodate the contradictory logics of exploration and exploitation. This article examines the logics of exploration and exploitation, evaluates the difficulties of accommodating both logics, and identifies dynamic ambidexterity as a new way to overcome these difficulties. To achieve dynamic ambidexterity, firms need to support structural ambidexterity at the corporate level, contextual ambidexterity at the business-unit level, and sequential ambidexterity at the project level. I believe that the notion of dynamic ambidexterity and its managerial practices can help firms manage exploration and exploitation and ensure long-term survival and prosperity.     

Organizational ambidexterity: Integrating deliberate and emergent strategy with scenario planning

In this article we propose scenario planning as a tool for fostering organizational ambidexterity. The concept of organizational ambidexterity continues to gain attention, however, clear methods for developing this organizational ability are generally not offered. We therefore describe organizational ambidexterity and situate it in the general strategy literature. Key characteristics of organizational ambidexterity are provided, and the logical link to scenario planning is made. As the concept of organizational ambidexterity is relatively novel, our proposal highlights the use of scenario planning as a potential tool for developing this organizational “skill”, and clear next steps are described to examine our proposal as well as leverage the concept of organizational ambidexterity beyond that of a simple metaphor.     

Understanding the exploration–exploitation dilemma: An fMRI study of attention control and decision‐making performance

This paper studies the cognitive processes that enable decision makers to switch between exploitation and exploration. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a sample of expert decision makers to make two main contributions. First, we identify and contrast the specific brain regions and cognitive processes associated with exploitation and exploration decisions. Exploitation activates regions associated with reward seeking, which track and evaluate the value of current choices, while exploration relies on regions associated with attentional control, tracking the value of alternative choices. Second, we propose and test the idea that stronger activation of the brain circuits related to attentional control allows individuals to achieve better decision‐making performance as a result. We discuss the implications of these results for strategic management research and practice. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd