Stefan Berger

Prior research suggests that the organizational context supports the emergence ofemployee ambidexterity; however, the interplay between formal and informal con-text has been largely unexplored. We analyze this interplay with a multilevel, multi-source data set of 2446 individual employees nested in 77 organizations. We findthat a promotion climate—unlike a prevention climate—contributes to employeeambidexterity. In addition, formalization positively moderates the effects of both pro-motion and prevention climate on employee ambidexterity, while centralizationweakens the positive effect of promotion climate. Our results advance a contingencyperspective that brings together formal and informal contextual drivers of employeeambidexterity and shows that even though an informal climate signals the preferredmanner of goal pursuit, a formal structure affects the impact of such signals by delin-eating opportunity corridors of admissible behaviors.