Pathways to Ambidexterity In Exploration–Exploitation

Management scholars offered extolling descriptions of ambidextrous managers, those who can balance exploration and exploitation, and sought contextual and personal factors that distinguish them. Yet, in decades of research, few empirically investigated the cognitive processes that underlie differences in ambidexterity. So here we combine novel behavioral measures, laboratory experiments, protocol analysis, and text analysis to uncover how decision-makers think and behave in a canonical exploration–exploitation environment: search on a rugged landscape. We observe a variety of behaviors and group them into five categories, based on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie them. Differences in ambidexterity, we find, are driven by different types of cognition. And, somewhat surprisingly, we find no clear link between ambidexterity and performance. Thus, the findings suggest that ambidextrous decision-makers are not a homogenous bunch, so the search for common personality and demographic characteristics may be futile. Rather, ambidextrous behavior is multi-hued: It may be generated by a variety of cognitive processes, and similar revealed behaviors and performance could stem from differing cognitive processes. This realization holds implications for research on cognition, exploration–exploitation, entrepreneurship as well as management practice and organizational design.