Raphael Bömelburg

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.

Research on ambidexterity has increasingly taken an interest in individual level ambidexterity as a potential micro-foundation of competitive advantage. While several antecedents of individual ambidexterity have been identified, actionable angles for managing and developing this capability on the level of the employee are largely missing. We adopt a social cognitive perspective and identify explorative self-efficacy as a predictor of individual ambidexterity that can be influenced by transformational leadership. Drawing on primary, multi-informant data from 245 employees we find strong support for our hypotheses. Our results both show actionable angles for practitioners and point the theoretic discussion of the emergence of individual ambidexterity towards the potential of models of self-regulation.

Stakeholder theory has often been criticized as being too generic. In order to refine our knowledge about some of its core concepts and their relationships, this study examines the nexus between organizational justice, conflict, and stakeholder satisfaction. Building on attribution theory, we hypothesize that the level of conflict moderates the relationship between the procedural, distributive, and interpersonal dimensions of organizational justice on the one and satisfaction on the other hand. Testing our hypotheses on survey data from 166 employees of Swiss electronics firms yields broad support for our theoretical account. We find that conflict positively moderates the effect of procedural justice on satisfaction, whereas it negatively moderates the effect of interpersonal and distributive justice on satisfaction. We discuss implications for stakeholder theory, the broader literature on organizational justice, and management practice.