Detectando as raízes históricas da ambidestria organizacional por meio da análise espectroscópica

Achieving and sustaining competitive advantages are the main objective in the strategic management of an organization. March (1991), in one of the most referenced articles on organizational ambidexterity (OA), stresses that the ability of a company to exploit its assets and resources profitably ('exploitation'), while developing new technologies and markets ('exploration') is crucial to your long-term success. Over the last 20 years of development of research on OA (organizational ambidexterity), what are the greatest academic contributions that have marked the area and which concepts are still relevant and necessary? The objective of this study is to map the intellectual bases that support research in OA, identifying the turning points that constitute this field of research. According to Duncan's (1976) seminal work, organizations develop ambidexterity in a sequential approach, modifying their own structure over time to keep them aligned with the company's purpose, given competing demands for innovation and efficiency. For other authors Tushman and O'Reilly (1996) as well as O'Reilly and Tushman (2013) there is a 'tradeoff' between 'exploitation' and 'exploitation' and that the successful organization is the one that manages to balance both. The concept of ambidexterity can be applied to strategy, structure, processes and human resources. March (1991) lays important foundations for research on ambidexterity by developing the concepts of 'exploration' and 'exploitation', addressing their occurrence as a result of organizational learning. For this author, there is an exchange between individual and organizational learning and that this learning produces ambidexterity. Tushman and O'Reilly (1996) look at organizational ambidexterity by comparing it to evolutionary biology. For them, the evolution of the organization occurs naturally in response to market stimuli (challenges or threats). With this, it was possible to observe the decisive advantage offered by the adoption of the RPYS method in which the decisive historical documents could be identified based on the number of references cited by the academic community and without any additional assumptions. This approach contributed to achieving the objective of mapping the intellectual bases that support research in organizational ambidexterity, identifying historical turning points in the field of study. Theoretical implications allow researchers to make use of the evidence presented here to identify the concepts sedimented by the recurrence of their use in several articles and, at the same time, find gaps for questions that are actually relevant to the theme. As practical contributions, from the results presented, managers can make more conscious decisions about how to make their organizations more ambidextrous, maintaining their competitive advantages in the present and preparing for future challenges.