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Behind Managers’ Ambidexterity — Studying Personality Traits, Leadership, and Environmental Conditions Associated with Exploration and Exploitation

  • Managers’ Ambidexterity
  • Published:
Schmalenbach Business Review Aims and scope

Abstract

Exploration and exploitation are defined as two integrative concepts of organizational learning behavior, both of which are associated with different types of tasks. We find that the exploration task type is positively related to a personal disposition towards openness to experience and to environmental dynamism. We find that the exploitation task type is positively linked to conscientiousness, and that transactional leadership of managers’ superiors is positively related to managers’ engagement in exploitation tasks. We also find managers with a personal disposition associated with engagement in one of the two task types also increase engagement in the other when certain situational requirements are met.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FernUniversität in Hagen, Universitätsstraße 11, 58097, Hagen, Germany

    Tobias Keller (Research Assistant at the Department of Business Administration and Economics, Chair of Business Administration, Leadership and Organization) & Jürgen Weibler (Full Professor at the Department of Business Administration and Economics, Chair of Business Administration, Leadership and Organization)

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  1. Tobias Keller
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  2. Jürgen Weibler
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Correspondence to Tobias Keller.

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The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. A previous version of this paper is part of the first author’s PhD thesis.

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Keller, T., Weibler, J. Behind Managers’ Ambidexterity — Studying Personality Traits, Leadership, and Environmental Conditions Associated with Exploration and Exploitation. Schmalenbach Bus Rev 66, 309–333 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03396909

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