Developing and Leading Ambidextrous Teams: A Team-Centric Framework of Ambidexterity in Volatile Environments

Abstract

To meet the adaptive challenges of rapidly changing environments, leaders of organizational teams and team-based entities can leverage the powerful dynamic capabilities of ambidexterity to achieve sustainable innovation and longterm adaptation. This conceptual inquiry focuses on the special characteristics of teams and teamwork, and how those can afford dynamic potential for achieving ambidexterity. Teams intrinsically function dynamically as integrative adaptive systems. Teams hold unique advantages for sensing and seizing new opportunities, and for reallocating taskwork and reconfiguring resources. Such advantages enable teams to more effectively align and balance exploration and exploitation for sustained innovation and successful adaptation. This inquiry draws from existing studies of dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity, and integrates that research with the well-established literature on teams and teamwork. This study examines the key processes and dynamics of team ambidexterity. The study synthesizes, and proposes a systems model that indicates team-centric mechanisms and dynamic linkages by which ambidexterity can operate as dynamic capabilities within teams. The analysis and model add to the development of organizational change theory and orients future studies of ambidexterity at meso level. This inquiry also benefits organizational leaders by providing valuable insights and practical tools for developing, leading, and supporting teams that can perform effectively under turbulent conditions.