Figure 2- Internal graph of the organization
Organizationally Business Danmark consists of a headquarter with 80 employees and eight small local divisions across Denmark. The local divisions are irrelevant for this paper as they are not part of daily operations, communication or strategy planning. If we look at how Business Danmark is structured (figure 2) we see how it follows a classical hierarchical approach like most companies. Campus however is positioned as a separate entity with its own sales force, social media channels, marketing production and even customer service capabilities in some degree due to the strong specialization on students.
Campus primarily differentiates itself from the other divisions in two key ways.
Drawing from Mintzbergs (1983) basic views on organizational function, we use an
informal communication perspective as well as the notion of work constellations to illustrate how Campus is uniquely positioned to build ambidextrous competencies.
As mentioned by other ambidexterity researchers (Turner et al., 2014), the project manager is in a unique role to focus both on exploration and exploitation simultaneously as he spans the entire hierarchy. This can be observed by the division being strongly connected to sales, marketing and customer service, as the only division in the company. This means that there in practice exists informal communication paths to the majority of people in headquarter, which is a valuable asset in the quest to build ambidextrous competencies. These semi-formal ties also lead to some different work constellations where the division work together with other departments as a lot of shared goals exists.
One exploitative example is how the division has worked together with customer service to create new guidelines for handling the massively growing student flow, something that traditionally fell to customer service to figure out for themselves, but in the end benefits both divisions. To mention an explorative cross-division example as well the division has worked together with IT and sales to develop a new lead-generating solution which allows them to get leads from entirely new channels without even attending events.
We already now see traces related to the value a disintegrated team/division structure brings to the table in regard to managing both explorative and exploitative pressures.
In our theory section I argued in line with Birkinshaw and Gupta (2013) on the topic of ambidexterity being a nested concept, transpiring multiple organizational levels and we can illustrate that point in regard to business Danmark by looking at the three levels chosen (figure 3).
Figure 3 - Ambidexterity dilemma illustrated in Business Danmark
It can be observed how they at a macro-level handle the pressure of ambidexterity by letting the communication department be the primary explorer. The communication department however also have a lot of exploitive operational tasks to deal with so they push the very explorative task of channel development to Campus as a new separated entity (annex 2). Campus however also starts experiencing the exploitative pressures now but can’t push it any further down the chain and is “forced” to resolve the ambidexterity dilemma themselves at the operational and individual level. As they have to handle both pressures on a daily basis it almost makes sense that some kind of contextual ambidexterity will be observed as well as some inter-temporal strategies employed.
Tier 3 - The Campus division
Division cant push it down, but only between each other Explores & Exploits
Tier 2 - The Communication department
Campus Explores
Rest of department Exploits
Tier 1 - Business Danmark
Communication department Explores
Rest of the house Exploits
A N A L Y S I S
We will now begin our main analysis, finding evidence for the different ways ambidexterity can be observed and understood in Business Danmark’s Campus division. The analysis consists of three parts. The first part applies a temporal perspective, looking at how ambidextrous competency is created from the birth of the division until present day. The second part investigates a full yearly work-cycle to look for strategic and practical clues as to the balancing and management of ambidexterity, and finally the third section looks at how the individuals in the team contribute to this balance.
1. BUILDING AMBIDEXTROUS COMPETENCY – A TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE
“What factors contribute to the formation of ambidextrous competency seen from a temporal perspective in the division over the course of 4 years?”
That’s the sub-question I asked in the research question in order to understand how the division has built the competencies necessary in allowing them to shift effortlessly (it seems) between optimizing existing activities and processes (exploitation) and developing new concepts and partnerships (exploration).
To keep the scope of this paper in line, what I want to investigate in this section specifically, is how we can observe the different activities evolve over the four year period the division has existed, and then score the current year on a scale from -100 to +100, -100 representing only exploitative activities being performed, +100 representing purely explorative activities being performed, leaving 0 to represent a state of orthogonal ambidexterity. By doing this, it will first of all be possible to introduce the types of tasks the division are engaged in which will prove valuable when seeking to understand the balancing of these tasks, and second of all it will allow us to
which will allow us to spot a time-based trend in the evolvement of explorative and exploitative activities. The OAS is found in a mix between an interview with Maria, the former project manager (annex 1), and my own daily observations. Obviously it is difficult to put an exact number on exactly how explorative a year is, and the quantification is only done to be able to see the relative difference between the years and map out trends.