IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/respol/v49y2020i1s004873331930160x.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ambidexterity in government: The influence of different types of legitimacy on innovation

Author

Listed:
  • Nowacki, Caroline
  • Monk, Ashby

Abstract

Using a comparative case study of four independent infrastructure agencies in Australia, this article explores how governments can use structural ambidexterity to innovate. Independent agencies can serve as exploration units, but their innovation needs to be integrated into the rest of government. Instead of relying on an executive team to do it, independent agencies can take on this role, but they need to become legitimate to several government actors to influence government processes. Legitimacy can come from regulations, practical value, moral values or cognitive frames. Relying on regulations solely reduces influence; but relying on cognitive legitimacy leads to losing one's ability to radically innovate. We conclude that leading both exploration and integration relies on the exploration unit employees’ practical and moral legitimacy to several actors, and their ability to maintain cognitive distance from other governmental units. However, we caution that such a balance is hard to sustain over the long run, leading many innovative agencies to appeal to cognitive legitimacy and revert to incremental innovation over time.

Suggested Citation

  • Nowacki, Caroline & Monk, Ashby, 2020. "Ambidexterity in government: The influence of different types of legitimacy on innovation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(1).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:respol:v:49:y:2020:i:1:s004873331930160x
    DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2019.103840
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873331930160X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.respol.2019.103840?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Caroline Nowacki, 2019. "The financier state: infrastructure planning and asset recycling in New South Wales, Australia," Chapters, in: Raymond E. Levitt & W. R. Scott & Michael J. Garvin (ed.), Public–Private Partnerships for Infrastructure Development, chapter 12, pages 246-264, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    2. Wendy K. Smith & Michael L. Tushman, 2005. "Managing Strategic Contradictions: A Top Management Model for Managing Innovation Streams," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 16(5), pages 522-536, October.
    3. Sebastian Raisch & Julian Birkinshaw & Gilbert Probst & Michael L. Tushman, 2009. "Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 20(4), pages 685-695, August.
    4. George Westerman & F. Warren McFarlan & Marco Iansiti, 2006. "Organization Design and Effectiveness over the Innovation Life Cycle," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 17(2), pages 230-238, April.
    5. Koryak, Oksana & Lockett, Andy & Hayton, James & Nicolaou, Nicos & Mole, Kevin, 2018. "Disentangling the antecedents of ambidexterity: Exploration and exploitation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(2), pages 413-427.
    6. James G. March, 1991. "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 2(1), pages 71-87, February.
    7. Chang, Yuan-Chieh & Yang, Phil Y. & Chen, Ming-Huei, 2009. "The determinants of academic research commercial performance: Towards an organizational ambidexterity perspective," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(6), pages 936-946, July.
    8. Justin J. P. Jansen & Michiel P. Tempelaar & Frans A. J. van den Bosch & Henk W. Volberda, 2009. "Structural Differentiation and Ambidexterity: The Mediating Role of Integration Mechanisms," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 20(4), pages 797-811, August.
    9. O'Reilly, Charles A., III & Tushman, Michael L., 2013. "Organizational Ambidexterity: Past, Present and Future," Research Papers 2130, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    10. Constantine Andriopoulos & Marianne W. Lewis, 2009. "Exploitation-Exploration Tensions and Organizational Ambidexterity: Managing Paradoxes of Innovation," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 20(4), pages 696-717, August.
    11. Bledow, Ronald & Frese, Michael & Anderson, Neil & Erez, Miriam & Farr, James, 2009. "A Dialectic Perspective on Innovation: Conflicting Demands, Multiple Pathways, and Ambidexterity," Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2(3), pages 305-337, September.
    12. Clark G. Gilbert, 2006. "Change in the Presence of Residual Fit: Can Competing Frames Coexist?," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 17(1), pages 150-167, February.
    13. John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, 1991. "Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 2(1), pages 40-57, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Khan, Zaheer & Amankwah-Amoah, Joseph & Lew, Yong Kyu & Puthusserry, Pushyarag & Czinkota, Michael, 2022. "Strategic ambidexterity and its performance implications for emerging economies multinationals," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(3).
    2. Fjellström, Daniella & Bai, Wensong & Oliveira, Luis & Fang, Tony, 2023. "Springboard internationalisation in times of geopolitical tensions," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 32(6).
    3. Hartmann, Mia Rosa & Hartmann, Rasmus Koss, 2023. "Hiding practices in employee-user innovation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(4).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. David B. Audretsch & Maribel Guerrero, 2023. "Is ambidexterity the missing link between entrepreneurship, management, and innovation?," The Journal of Technology Transfer, Springer, vol. 48(6), pages 1891-1918, December.
    2. Koryak, Oksana & Lockett, Andy & Hayton, James & Nicolaou, Nicos & Mole, Kevin, 2018. "Disentangling the antecedents of ambidexterity: Exploration and exploitation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(2), pages 413-427.
    3. Sebastian Raisch & Michael L. Tushman, 2016. "Growing New Corporate Businesses: From Initiation to Graduation," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 27(5), pages 1237-1257, October.
    4. Lulu Liu & Fengbin Wang & Xiukun Li, 2019. "Comparing the configured causal antecedents of exploration and exploitation: a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis," Frontiers of Business Research in China, Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 1-25, December.
    5. Jan Ossenbrink & Joern Hoppmann & Volker H. Hoffmann, 2019. "Hybrid Ambidexterity: How the Environment Shapes Incumbents’ Use of Structural and Contextual Approaches," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(6), pages 1319-1348, November.
    6. Úbeda-García, Mercedes & Claver-Cortés, Enrique & Marco-Lajara, Bartolomé & Zaragoza-Sáez, Patrocinio, 2020. "Toward a dynamic construction of organizational ambidexterity: Exploring the synergies between structural differentiation, organizational context, and interorganizational relations," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 363-372.
    7. Andreea N. Kiss & Dirk Libaers & Pamela S. Barr & Tang Wang & Miles A. Zachary, 2020. "CEO cognitive flexibility, information search, and organizational ambidexterity," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(12), pages 2200-2233, December.
    8. Jan Ossenbrink & Joern Hoppmann, 2019. "Polytope Conditioning and Linear Convergence of the Frank–Wolfe Algorithm," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 44(1), pages 1319-1348, February.
    9. Wenke, Kathrin & Zapkau, Florian B. & Schwens, Christian, 2021. "Too small to do it all? A meta-analysis on the relative relationships of exploration, exploitation, and ambidexterity with SME performance," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 132(C), pages 653-665.
    10. Yasser Alizadeh & Antonie J. Jetter, 2019. "Pathways for Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in Innovations: A Review and Expansion of Ambidexterity Theory," International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management (IJITM), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 16(05), pages 1-33, August.
    11. van Assen, Marcel F., 2020. "Empowering leadership and contextual ambidexterity – The mediating role of committed leadership for continuous improvement," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 435-449.
    12. François Constant & Richard Calvi & Thomas Johnsen, 2020. "Managing tensions between exploitative and exploratory innovation through purchasing function ambidexterity Managing tensions between exploitative and exploratory innovation through purchasing functio," Post-Print hal-02891790, HAL.
    13. Katsuki Aoki & Miriam Wilhelm, 2017. "The Role of Ambidexterity in Managing Buyer–Supplier Relationships: The Toyota Case," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 28(6), pages 1080-1097, December.
    14. Sebastian Raisch & Julian Birkinshaw & Gilbert Probst & Michael L. Tushman, 2009. "Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 20(4), pages 685-695, August.
    15. Lysander Weiss & Dominik Kanbach, 2022. "Toward an integrated framework of corporate venturing for organizational ambidexterity as a dynamic capability," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 72(4), pages 1129-1170, December.
    16. Schnellbächer, Benedikt & Heidenreich, Sven & Wald, Andreas, 2019. "Antecedents and effects of individual ambidexterity – A cross-level investigation of exploration and exploitation activities at the employee level," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 37(4), pages 442-454.
    17. Olga Kassotaki, 2022. "Review of Organizational Ambidexterity Research," SAGE Open, , vol. 12(1), pages 21582440221, March.
    18. Arman Avadikyan & Gilles Lambert & Christophe Lerch, 2016. "A Multi-Level Perspective on Ambidexterity: The Case of a Synchrotron Research Facility," Working Papers of BETA 2016-44, Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
    19. Jiewei Zu & Jianan Wang & Jun Ma, 2022. "Ambidexterity in a Rapidly Changing Environment of China: Top Management Team Decision Making and Sustained Performance," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(7), pages 1-20, March.
    20. Priyono Anjar & Nursyamsiah Siti & Darmawan Baziedy A., 2019. "Managing ambidexterity in internationalisation of SMEs from an emerging country: A dynamic capability perspective," HOLISTICA – Journal of Business and Public Administration, Sciendo, vol. 10(3), pages 7-26, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:respol:v:49:y:2020:i:1:s004873331930160x. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/respol .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.