Olli-Pekka Kauppila

Creating ambidexterity by integrating and balancing structurally separate interorganizational partnerships

Recent research indicates that interorganizational partnerships represent a potentially important resource for the development of ambidexterity. However, little is known about how a firm’s ambidexterity evolves from external partnership resources. This article reports an in-depth field investigation of a firm that has successfully created ambidexterity by employing its interorganizational exploration and exploitation partnerships. In particular, the article focuses on three innovation processes within this firm. The findings underscore the importance of a firm’s ambidextrous organizational context, enabling it to reap the distinct benefits of both exploration and exploitation partnerships. Moreover, the findings reveal the specific mechanisms through which the firm integrated and balanced exploration and exploitation within its organization. Overall, this article demonstrates how a firm can build and manage an organizational context that internally balances exploration and exploitation while augmenting both activities through structurally separate interorganizational partnerships.

So, What Am I Supposed to Do? A Multilevel Examination of Role Clarity

Although prior research generally holds that role clarity is affected by both individual characteristics and organizational contexts, current conceptual or empirical models do not reflect the multilevel nature of these antecedents. A more complete understanding of how role clarity emanates from different organizational levels is necessary to help prevent poor job performance and other harmful consequences of ambiguous role expectations. To address this, I begin this research by investigating the effects of internal work locus of control, general self-efficacy, and leader–member exchange on role clarity. With respect to the cross-level effects, I focus on the roles of a managers control style and the organizations strategy-making pattern. Analyses of a multi-industry, multilevel dataset collected from 724 employees and 124 managers in 25 organizations in Finland suggest that all of the individual-level independent variables and a deliberate strategy-making pattern improve role clarity. However, a deliberate strategy-making pattern negatively moderates the relationship between general self-efficacy and role clarity. Finally, even though an outcome-based control system causes role ambiguity among employees in most functional areas, it may be an effective driver of role clarity among employees in sales jobs.

Connecting and Creating: Tertius Iungens, Individual Creativity, and Strategic Decision Processes

Previous research has highlighted the importance of tertius iungens (TI) orientation, a strategic orientation toward connecting people in one’s social network to implementing and integrating ideas....

The Capability Antecedents and Performance Effects of Exploration and Exploitation Alliances

This paper examines how alliance capabilities augment firm performance through exploration and exploitation alliances. The results show that exploration alliances are driven by scanning and learning capabilities, whereas exploitation alliances are driven by scanning and coordination capabilities. Moreover, both exploration and exploitation alliances promote firm performance.

Facilitating employees’ tertius iungens orientation: The role of organizational context

This paper examines potential organizational determinants of individual employees’ tertius iungens orientation (TIO), referring to the strategic and behavioral orientation of an individual for connecting people across one’s social network. In previous studies, TIO has been found to facilitate inter-group cooperation, knowledge sharing and innovation, but little research has thus far looked into its potential organizational conditions. Analyses of multilevel and multilevel data shed new light on what organizations can do to facilitate their members’ TIO. At the firm level, we find that the centripetal force of senior team shared vision is positively associated with employees’ TIO, whereas the centrifugal force of decentralization has a negative influence. Further, group-level LMX and the supervisor’s performance expectations we found to influence TIO positively at the group-level. These findings have a number of important implications to both theory and practice.