Organizational ambidexterity through intellectual capital configurations: a U.S. strategic military headquarters perspective

Organizations consistently face a significant tension between long-term planning and the need to address immediate demands. The need to both exploit the current situation and explore the broader landscape is well known, yet organizations often struggle to find the right balance between the two. By merging the concept of ambidexterity (the ability to simultaneously both explore and exploit) and the concept of intellectual capital (how knowledge is formed, stored, and utilized in social groups), this study aims to better understand how human, social, and organizational capital can be configured within top management reams to support more effective collective decision-making. Through a qualitative exploration of a set of U.S. military strategic headquarters, this study identified which elements within these organizations supported organizational ambidexterity and which impeded it. By mapping them via a new model and process, an organizational intellectual capital profile was developed that provides a deeper understanding of these top management teams and their capabilities. This study finds that U.S. Combatant Commands’ Organizational Ambidexterity is hindered by a highly mechanistic organizational construct but enabled by a “Joint” social structure that behaviorally integrates top management teams well for both exploration and exploitation. Within their context, human capital is the key that enables these purportedly strategically minded teams to shift focus when necessary and attempt to achieve an optimal fit within their environment. Through this analysis, the study developed a new construct, the Harmonization Spectrum Model of Intellectual Capital. This nuanced model, by enabling deeper analysis of intellectual capital and the visualization of how different configurations can affect the optimization of organizational ambidexterity, will hopefully significantly advance discussions in the field of Strategic Management.