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Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Please consider submitting your work to our special issue, which has now a final extended deadline of the 31 December 2020.
THUNDERBIRD INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS REVIEW
CALL FOR PAPERS
Ambidextrous Organizations in and from Emerging Markets
Extended Deadline: 31 December 2020
Guest Co-Editors:
AIMS AND SCOPE
The aim of this special issue is to bring together scholars from various disciplines in business and management studies, in order to extend existing theoretical frameworks on organizational ambidexterity and encourage new research in under-researched EM contexts.
We welcome both qualitative and quantitative studies, along with state of art conceptual (literature review) papers. Due to the relative uniqueness and newness of the topic, case studies (single in-depth cases or comparative cases) are particularly welcome.
We invite research focusing on, but not limited to, the following topics:
• Organizational ambidexterity and the role of national culture in and from EM context
• Leadership styles, and organizational ambidexterity in and from EM context
• Organizational culture and ambidexterity in and from EM context
• HRM strategies in ambidextrous organizations in and from EM context
• Conceptualization of organizational ambidexterity and influences of national culture in and from EM context
• Functional ambidexterity (e.g. innovation ambidexterity, production ambidexterity) and its influences on firm performance in and from EM context
• Organizational ambidexterity and internationalization strategies of firms in and from EM
• Equity vs. non-equity market entry modes, leadership and role of organizational ambidexterity in and from EM (both MNEs and SMEs)
• Longitudinal case studies on how organizational ambidexterity is achieved in different EMs and influences of leadership, culture and HRM on the process
• Grounded theory-based research to enhance theoretical frameworks on organizational ambidexterity for EM context
• Global value chains and role of organizational ambidexterity of firms in and from EM context
OVERVIEW AND PURPOSE OF SPECIAL ISSUE:
Emerging markets (EMs) are increasingly playing an important role in a globalized economy. The increased importance of emerging market multinationals (EMNCs) is evident in recent academic discourse.
The extant literature on organizational ambidexterity portrays a variety of sectors (traditional, high-tech) and methodological settings, and
the empirical findings to date are mixed (e.g. Junni et al., 2013; Junni et al., 2015). Through our call for papers we thus attempt to fill a specific gap in this context. More specifically, we aim to solicit studies exploring the aspects of internationalization
by ambidextrous organizations in and from emerging markets.
Empirical research shows that some EMNCs are ambidextrous organizations, able to simultaneously pursue two disparate, and, at times, seemingly
contradictory strategies (Luo and Rui, 2009).
Organizational ambidexterity is an emerging field of research which has significant implications on the evolving leadership and HRM literature
(Stokes et al., 2017; 2018). A review of the extant literature reveals that organizational ambidexterity has been studied primarily in the context of firms operating within the developed market (DM) context (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2013).
In this vein, utilizing ten in-depth case studies of European firms’ corporate innovation initiatives, Zimmermann, Raisch, and Cardinal (2018)
explored how frontline managers shape their organizational contexts to reconcile exploration/exploitation tensions. They found that frontline managers play a more central, proactive, and strategic role with respect to organizational ambidexterity through configurational
practices than assumed by senior executives’ initial design choices.
Another study by Jansen et al. (2016) examined - via a socio-psychological perspective - the contingency role of supportive leadership behaviors
on the emergence of team ambidexterity, and concluded that supportive behaviors of senior executives may not be always beneficial but rather a double-edged sword for team-level psychological attributes.
Examples of organizational ambidexterity studies can also be found in the International Business (IB) realm with more inclination toward culturally-diverse
and internationalization-focused contexts. For example, employing case studies to examine ambidexterity as a dynamic capability in the globalization of Swedish firms, Vahlne and Jonsson (2017) indicated that the dynamic capability of ambidexterity adds to
the explanatory power of the Uppsala globalization process model.
Given the current state of the literature on organizational ambidexterity, there is a gap in the understanding of what constitutes organizational
ambidexterity in EMNCs. Exceptions are studies undertaken by Luo and Hui (2009), Winterhalter et al. (2016), Rao-Nicholson et al. (2016), Malik et al. (2017), Stokes et al. (2017), Chen et al. (2018) and Yu et al. (2018). However, these studies are exploratory
in nature and it would be helpful to complement the existing findings with in-depth and specific studies on dynamics, development and management of organizational ambidexterity in the EM context. It is further important to mention that EMs are not a homogenous
group of countries, and there are significant variations across EMs (Karolyi, 2015). Moreover, the role of leadership and HRM in the context of culture and internationalization has been argued to be important determinants of organizational ambidexterity (Malik
et al, 2017, Pereira and Malik, 2018; Budhwar et al., 2020). However, these determinants have been rarely investigated within an EM context. Some studies which have addressed the role of ambidexterity in the EM context are mostly focusing on internationalization
or merger and acquisition topics (e.g. Rao-Nicholson et al., 2016; Chebbi et al., 2017). In addition, so far, extant research on ambidextrous organizations has focused primarily on more well-known EMs, in particular, China and India. Keeping in view this gap
in the extant literature, there is a need to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of ambidextrous organizations in EMs by empirically focusing on the under-researched ‘culture and internationalization’ context of other EM countries in Africa, Latin America,
transitional periphery of EU and less researched Asian countries (e.g. Hsu, Lien and Chen, 2013; Martin, Javalgi and Cavusgil, 2017; Pereira, et al, 2018).
REFERENCES:
Budhwar, P., Pereira, V., and Temouri, Y. (2020). Investigating challenges faced by EMNCs and MNCs in the MENA region. International Studies
of Management & Organization. Forthcoming.
Chebbi, H., Yahiaoui, D., Vrontis, D., & Thrassou, A. (2017). The impact of ambidextrous leadership on the internationalization of emerging‐market
firms: The case of India. Thunderbird International Business Review, 59(3), 421-436.
Chen, M., Yang, Z., Dou, W., & Wang, F. (2018). Flying or dying? Organizational change, customer participation, and innovation ambidexterity
in emerging economies. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 35(1), 97-119.
Hsu, C. W., Lien, Y. C., & Chen, H. (2013). International ambidexterity and firm performance in small emerging economies. Journal of World
Business, 48(1), 58-67.
Jansen, J. J., Kostopoulos, K. C., Mihalache, O. R., & Papalexandris, A. (2016). A socio‐psychological
perspective on team ambidexterity: The contingency role of supportive leadership behaviours. Journal of Management Studies, 53(6), 939-965.
Junni, P., Sarala, R.M., Taras, V., & Tarba, S.Y. (2013). Organizational ambidexterity and performance: A meta-analysis. The Academy of Management
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Junni, P., Sarala, R. M., Tarba, S., Liu, Y., & Cooper, C. (2015). The role of human resource and organizational factors in ambidexterity.
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Luo, Y., & Rui, H. (2009). An ambidexterity perspective toward multinational enterprises from emerging economies. Academy of Management Perspectives,
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Rao-Nicholson, R., Khan, Z., Akhtar, P., & Merchant, H. (2016). The impact of leadership on organizational ambidexterity and employee psychological
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Stokes, P., Moore, N., Smith, S. M., Larson, M. J., & Brindley, C. (2017). Organizational ambidexterity and the emerging‐to‐advanced
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Stokes, P., Smith, S., Wall, T., Moore, N., Rowland, C., Ward, T., & Cronshaw, S. (2018). Resilience and the (micro-) dynamics of organizational ambidexterity: implications for strategic HRM. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 1-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2018.1474939
Vahlne, J. E., & Jonsson, A. (2017). Ambidexterity as a dynamic capability in the globalization of the multinational business enterprise (MBE):
Case studies of AB Volvo and IKEA. International Business Review, 26(1), 57-70.
Winterhalter, S., Zeschky, M. B., & Gassmann, O. (2016). Managing dual business models in emerging markets: an ambidexterity perspective. R&D
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Yu, X., Meng, X., Chen, Y., Chen, Y., & Nguyen, B. (2018). Work-family conflict, organizational ambidexterity and new venture legitimacy in emerging economies. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 135, 229-240.
Zimmermann, A., Raisch, S., & Cardinal, L. B. (2018). Managing persistent tensions on the frontline: A configurational perspective on ambidexterity.
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