ABSTRACT

Organizations and their managers are confronted with choices and tradeoffs among competing objectives all the time, and thus, the ambidexterity framework provides a readily applicable and normative perspective. This chapter addresses the lack of knowledge regarding the cognitive perspective in the endeavor to facilitate ambidexterity in an organization. It presents the findings from disparate research streams, drawing together the discussions from literature on organizational ambidexterity, duality and managerial cognition. The chapter focuses on the cognitive dimension in relation to different ways of building ambidexterity into an organization. It discusses the suggested solutions for managing ambidexterity: spatial, temporal, and contextual. The chapter also discusses how the cognitive dimension informs and contributes to the discussion on organizational ambidexterity. The growing recognition of the applicability of ambidexterity has given rise to a proliferation of diverse and parallel definitions and perspectives that provide insights into the cognitive dimension.