Achieving Opposites Simultaneously: A Review of Organizational Ambidexterity

The interaction between contemporary organizations and their environment is becoming more sophisticated. Organizations are facing an unpredictable and more complex environment than ever before, which is why they ought to pay attention to a much larger number of variables in the environment and their dynamics than was the case before (Stefanović et al., 2012). Numerous tendencies within the environment such as technology shifts, the increased influence of information and communication technology on organizational operations, deregulation, the changing face of competition, increased market transparency, more demanding and informed customers, changing economic and political structures, and the transformation of information and knowledge into the key economic resources have had a great impact on the majority of organizations (Stefanović et al., 2011). Thus, the business environment today may be seen as discontinuous because the mapping from firm actions to performance outcomes changes frequently, profoundly, and in ways that are difficult to predict (cf. Siggelkow and Rivkin, 2005). The environment discontinuity means the existence of any event in the environment that organizations cannot cope with on the basis of their existing capabilities and resources or the existence of events that could not be anticipated by the organization and therefore the organization is not able to adapt accordingly in the short term, even though it had the necessary resources and capabilities (Stefanović et al., 2012).