The Effects Of Ambidexterity In Team Innovation Cancept,Mechanism And Antecedents

In modern organizations, team-based innovation is becoming the mainstream. Entrepreneurs and managers pay more and more attentions to the value of team innovation. In the area of organizational management research, studies about team innovation are rapidly rising.The ambidexterity theory of innovation indicates that including team innovation, it is necessary to take both exploration and exploitation into account, which require conflicting demands. On this basis, we argue that there are several theoretical shortcomings in existing team innovation researches. First, a holistic theoretical perspective is lacked that many researches only focus on some local activities of team innovation, instead of the whole innovation process. Second, the effects of exploration and exploitation are separately considered, and their synergy effects, which is critical to team innovation, are not fully discussed. Last, with respect to team composition, previous antecedents of team innovation are biased, which means to be specific, the combination of team members' attributes are not considered under the ambidexterity perspective.In view of these shortcomings, our focal question in this research is the role of ambidexterity in team innovation. And it leads to three sub-questions, which are the transfer of ambidexterity construct from organizational level to team level, the mechanism of team ambidexterity's effect on team innovation, and the composition of members in an innovative team. We design and carry out four studies to respond to these questions.In Study 1, we analyze and compare three successful team innovation cases to demonstrate whether it is appropriate to transfer the ambidexterity construct from organizational level to team level. The results indicate that the ambidexterity construct is applicable to the context of team-level innovation. Based on this, we investigate the mechanism of team ambidexterity's effect on team innovation in Study 2. Empirical results from questionnaire data show that team ambidexterity has positive effect on innovative performance through the mediating of innovative behavior. And innovation radicalness plays the moderating role that the positive indirect effect becomes stronger when innovation is more radical.Then in Study 3 and Study 4, we construct two antecedents of team ambidexterity and team innovation from the ambidexterity perspective, dual expertise and dual cognitive style. We utilize secondhand data of US patent teams to empirically test the effects of dual expertise on team ambidexterity and innovative performance in Study 3. The results indicate that dual expertise has positive effects on team ambidexterity and following innovative performance. And cooperation experience plays the moderating role that dual expertise's positive effects become stronger when there are more cooperation experiences. In Study 4, we empirically test the effects of dual cognitive style on team ambidexterity and innovative performance using questionnaire data. The results indicate that dual cognitive style has positive effects on team ambidexterity and following innovative performance. And team structure plays the moderating role that dual cognitive style's positive effects become stronger when the level of team structure is lower.This research mainly has three theoretical contributions. First, we present the whole picture of team innovation process by analyzing exploration and exploitation, thus to address the limitation of process perspective in previous team innovation researches. Second, we transfer the theoretical progress of organizational-level ambidexterity to team-level innovation research and make some further extensions, therefore helping build a new theoretical system of team innovation around the concept of team-level ambidexterity. Last, we discover two antecedents of team ambidexterity and team innovation, which reflect the integration of exploration and exploitation. Thus, in this research, exploration and exploitation are no longer separated like in previous team innovation researches. The results of this research also have practical implications on the formation and training, and on the management and process control of innovative teams.At last, several limitations of this research and possible future directions are discussed.