International cultural ambidexterity: Balancing tensions of foreign market entry into distant and proximate cultures

Today’s internationalization challenges are no longer limited to dealing with cultural differences in bilateral interactions between a company’s headquarters and its subsidiary. Instead, companies need to simultaneously manage a portfolio of subsidiaries that can be culturally close or distant to each other. Existing literature has so far been slow at conceptualizing and measuring this phenomenon. Drawing on portfolio logic and an ambidexterity lens, we introduce the concept of international cultural ambidexterity (ICA) as a company’s dynamic capability to manage a portfolio of both culturally distant (exploration) and culturally proximate (exploitation) foreign markets. Developing ICA allows companies to benefit from cultural diversity and cultural distance and to better manage tensions arising from internationalization. We highlight differences between cultural distance, cultural diversity and ICA. Subsequently, we introduce a novel way of measuring ICA that extends studies on culture and ambidexterity in foreign market entry research.