Ambidextrous Human Resource Practices and Employee Performance

In today’s highly dynamic environment, Organisational Ambidexterity has assumed enormous significance. Ambidexterity, which is defined as the ability of an organisation to simultaneously engage in exploitation of current organisational capabilities and exploration of future opportunities, is said to have a positive impact on long term financial performance and innovations among many other firm level outcomes. However, review of extant literature shows that the linkage between ambidexterity and firm outcomes is not linear and its study warrants further investigation in order to develop deeper insights. Theory building in the ambidexterity literature from a Human Resource Management perspective, is hampered by lack of clarity on several issues such as- level of analysis, specific HRM variables, as well as the role of antecedent and intervening variables. This paper reviews past research and proposes a model in order to explain ‘why’ and ‘how’ Ambidextrous Human Resource practices impact performance at an individual level. In doing so, it proposes causal linkages between key constructs namely, ‘Ambidextrous HR practices, Organisational Culture, Middle manager’s ambidextrous behavioral orientation, and Individual Ambidexterity and their impact on employee level performance outcomes