Balancing Innovation: An investigation on the effects of individual ambidexterity on employee motivation

Sammanfattning: Like Darwin's finches that adapted to their changing natural environment, firms must also adapt to their changing business environment to survive. Determining which firms are the survivors and which are not, can be explained by Organizational ambidexterity. Today, the world is changing at an extremely fast pace, increasing the need for firms to both exploit existing capabilities and explore new ones through innovation. The field of ambidexterity has been researched extensively on the organizational level, but not yet on the individual level. Ambidexterity is a phenomenon that has an impact on all aspects of an organization, and here we seek to explore the effects that it has on motivating individuals. As ambidexterity is often used to measure effects on output, as its financial performance, we wanted to measure its effects on a firm's input, its employees. This study investigated the impact of individual ambidexterity on work motivation and hypothesized that ambidextrous individuals differ from non-ambidextrous individuals by being motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. A quantitative study was conducted at Sweden's largest and oldest telecommunications firm. Through the use of self-reported surveys, 160 innovation workers participated in the study. The study concludes that individual ambidexterity does have a positive effect on work motivation, but only to a certain extent. A negative interaction effect between exploration and exploitation was found, suggesting that organizations aiming to become more ambidextrous need to assist their employees in managing the tensions between exploration and exploitation.