By Jie Wang, Tae-Yeol Kim, Thomas S. Bateman, Yuan Jiang, and Guiyao Tang

In increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) business environments, paradoxes can be found everywhere in business. Successful companies are expected to demonstrate that their products and/or services have a proven track record of established excellence, while also having to constantly seek new ways to meet, manage and exceed changing consumer expectations. It’s a similar story for employees: they are expected to excel at their job by honing their craft and deepening their understanding of the organisation’s operational conditions, while also devoting much of their time and energy to seeking out opportunities to do their job better.

This "ambidexterity" – being able to both explore new opportunities and at the same time exploit existing knowledge, skills, and conditions – is inherently useful to both organisations and individuals. It allows for the pursuit of multiple, complementary, or even competing goals, keeping the organisation agile and its workforce engaged. Ambidextrous employees are more able to handle complex, often contrasting job requirements resulting from diverse customer and organisational needs or fast-changing technologies. In short, they are better equipped for working in a VUCA world.

Given the value of ambidexterity in the current global business environment, it’s more important than ever to understand which workplace conditions encourage employee ambidexterity and which stifle it. After surveying 364 employee-supervisor pairs from 74 R&D teams at two pharmaceutical companies and one IT service company in Eastern China, our study explored the link between employee ambidexterity and proactivity, and the moderating influences of job autonomy and paradoxical supervision.

Our results suggest that employees with a proactive disposition are more likely to display ambidexterity (and, indirectly, more creativity) in their work. A proactive mindset helps employees explore opportunities for radical change as well as incremental tweaks and improvements to their working practices. Those with low proactivity, on the other hand, are less likely to act in this explorative manner; they are more likely to be indifferent or even adverse to trying it, preferring to ‘stick to what they know’.

Higher job autonomy (an employee’s independence and discretion in scheduling their work and deciding how to perform tasks) enhances this relationship between a proactive disposition and employee ambidexterity and creativity. Employees with greater job autonomy feel they have the freedom to demonstrate their personal traits. Therefore, when naturally proactive employees are given a high level of autonomy, they take it as a cue to act with openness, adaptability, and flexibility – to be ambidextrous in their work.

Paradoxical supervision (when managers clarify work requirements without micromanaging work) was also found to enhance employee ambidexterity and creativity through proactivity.

Practically speaking, these results show that if an organisation wants its workforce to be ambidextrous and creative, it should encourage employees to be proactive and specifically seek out proactivity when hiring, training, and promoting employees. Having a proactive disposition appears to be a positive predictor of ambidexterity in employees regardless of their gender and ethnicity, indicating its overarching value no matter the identity makeup of the workforce in question.

Organisations can promote and strengthen proactive behaviours by helping their employees to develop self-chosen goals, collect information, implement plans, and collect and process feedback. They can also focus on how to give employees greater autonomy in a responsible manner, while also ensuring that managers are flexible enough to outline what needs to be done without veering towards micromanagement.

These are all essential considerations to be made and acted upon at all levels of an organisation. A VUCA environment is full of paradoxes, and this puts a premium on agility, adaptability, and ambidexterity. Similarly, there is less of a call for problem solving in isolated binary terms (i.e.: ‘We must enact Plan A or Plan B and stick with it’); organisations today must manage dilemmas via multiple decisions and solutions. Ultimately, that means making optimal use of employees who are equipped to follow these branching paths successfully.

This article is based on the study entitled “A Paradox Theory Lens on Proactivity, Individual Ambidexterity, and Creativity: An Empirical Look” by Jie Wang, Tae-Yeol Kim, Thomas S. Bateman, Yuan Jiang, and Guiyao Tang in the Journal of Organizational Behaviour.

Jie Wang (Fifi) is Professor in Organisational Behaviour at University of Nottingham Ningbo China; Tae-Yeol Kim is Philips Chair in Management at CEIBS; Thomas S. Bateman is Professor Emeritus at McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia; Yuan Jiang is an Associate Professor of Management at CEIBS; Guiyao Tang is a Professor in Human Resource Management at the School of Management, Shandong University, China.