Contributive roles of multilevel organizational learning for the evolution of organizational ambidexterity
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to reveal how organizational learning at the strategic and operational levels (i.e. strategic learning and business learning, respectively) contribute to the development of organizational ambidexterity along the growth of enterprises from an evolutionary view.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a longitudinal single case study on Huawei – a leading Chinese firm in the telecommunication industry. Data were collected from various sources including interviews, senior speeches, scholarly publications, company magazines and other documents, and was analyzed in line with the principles of grounded theory.
Findings
This research reveals that the case company (Huawei) constructed organizational ambidexterity with different foci during different development stages. The organization’s ambidextrous capability evolves over time, shifting from one domain to another. Such ambidexterity development was largely beneficial from the multilevel organizational learning at both the strategic level (focussing on the whole organization and long-term goals) and operational level (focussing on local interests and short-term goals).
Originality/value
This paper represents one of the earliest works to uncover the ambidexterity building process from an evolutionary approach that requires the collection of longitudinal data. Also, the paper proposes a multi-level learning framework for ambidexterity building in practice. This framework distinguishes strategic learning from business learning and projects the two types of learning into learning at four levels-individual, team, intra-organizational, and inter-organizational, which can be leveraged to guide division of labor among hierarchical levels during the progressive development of ambidexterity.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the Associate Editor and two anonymous reviewers who provided constructive suggestions for improving this paper. The authors also would like to acknowledge the financial supports from projects funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (No. 71371017, 71201165, 71571184).
Citation
Yan, M., Yu, Y. and Dong, X. (2016), "Contributive roles of multilevel organizational learning for the evolution of organizational ambidexterity", Information Technology & People, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 647-667. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-04-2015-0079
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited