Culture as a Critical Determinant of Dynamic Ambidexterity for Established Car Manufacturers: An International Study

The automotive industry is currently undergoing radical changes caused by vehicle electrification, autonomous and networked driving, and new service-oriented business models. These radical changes on various levels create existential challenges for the incumbent manufacturers. Academic research has addressed such challenges of radical innovation for incumbent players in numerous streams of research. In our study, we analyse eleven incumbent car manufacturers from six cultures over a period of 20 years and the results reveal differences in the process paradigm of dynamic ambidexterity. These differences cannot only be explained by OEMs’ altering timing strategies. In a nutshell, the research focus of our study rivets on the question of how the cultural background of OEMs in the automotive industry affects their strategic approach to handle ambidexterity in the disruptive transition towards electric mobility over time: Will a firms’ culture influence its trajectory to handle ambidexterity? We add an international, culture-based perspective to this fairly new field of dynamic ambidexterity by contextualising our findings with Hofstede’s concept of intercultural differences and, thus, identifying cultural characteristics as a determinant of dynamic ambidexterity.