Conclusiones parciales del capítulo

The results of this study suggest that the turbulence and complexity of the task

environment may influence whether an organization follows a punctuated equilibrium or an

ambidexterity model in balancing radical and incremental change, or exploration and

exploitation. The simulation models suggest that there are two different types of punctuated

equilibrium: catch-up and structural. In the catch-up punctuated equilibrium regime found in

simple and fast-moving environments, long periods of exploitative adaptation are interspersed

with short bursts of exploratory adaptation that are necessary to keep pace with rapidly

regime found in complex and slow-moving environments, the reason for the occasional bursts of

exploration is the need to periodically escape suboptimal stable equilibria. Furthermore,

ambidexterity is the dominant pattern of adaptation in two types of task environments: in

environments that are sufficiently simple and stable to make ambidexterity effortless, resulting in

stable ambidexterity regimes in which exploratory adaptation occurs through a series of

exploitative adaptive steps; and in environments that are sufficiently complex and turbulent to

make ambidexterity a necessity, creating a dynamic ambidexterity regime in which distinct acts

of exploratory and exploitative adaptation are constantly present. I hope that these results will be

useful in reconciling the discrepant empirical and theoretical arguments and furthering the

literature on organizational change patterns over time.

Acknowledgements

I thank Markku Maula, Thomas Keil, Julian Birkinshaw, Riitta Katila, Pasi Kuusela, and Hart

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1 _{Some scholars use the terms “sequential ambidexterity” (Simsek et al., 2009; Venkatraman et al., 2007) or}

“vacillation” (Boumgarden et al., 2012) to denote the pattern of temporal cycling between exploration and exploitation. In this paper, I follow Gupta et al. (2006) and Raisch and Birkinshaw (2008) and define ambidexterity as the simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation and therefore as distinct from the punctuated equilibrium model.

2 _{The key features of the NK model are not qualitatively sensitive to the number of potential values for each}

choice element (Kauffman, 1993); thus, it is customary to limit these values to 0 or 1.

3 _{To some degree, organizations can be argued to be able to influence the interdependencies between their}

decision elements by adopting different organizational structures (e.g. Schilling and Steensma, 2001). Because a closer analysis of organizational structure falls outside the scope of this paper, for the purposes of the analysis, I assume that the degree of interdependencies between the tasks is an exogenously given characteristic of the task environment.

4

With N environmental dimensions, each of which changes with the probability T, the probability that at

least one dimension changes is 1-(1-T)N. When N = 20 and T = 0.005, this probability is 1-0.99520 = 0.095.

5 _{The number of iterations (100) was chosen based on an evaluation of the point at which the simulation}

results began to converge such that any larger number of iterations would yield qualitatively similar results.

6 _{Because of the lack of a dynamic need to balance exploration and exploitation, whether such a stable}

change pattern should be labeled “ambidexterity” in the first place is debatable. Here, I use the term to denote the pattern in which the organization is able to fulfill both its short-term and long-term adaptive needs without temporally separating the two.