Team Ambidexterity and its Prerequisites: An Exploratory Study of an IT Service Management Team

Werner Matthias, Feldmann Jasmin, Montealegre Juliana, Stockhinger Jan

Abstract

Companies’ increasing reliance on information technology (IT) requires IT service management teams to ensure smooth, efficient, and reliable IT service delivery while learning and experimenting with innovative IT at the same time. These disparate demands create tensions for IT service management teams that are challenging to handle. In our study, we present one approach to effectively managing these tensions. By conducting a single-case study of a high-performance IT service management team responsible for 16,000 end-users in Latin America, we identified crucial activities and prerequisites that help deal with these tensions. In particular, we provide an overview of ten multi-level prerequisites and show that dealing with disparate demands on the team level also depends on organizational- and individual-level prerequisites. By answering several calls for studying the management of different demands at the team level, we contribute to the scarce research on team ambidexterity.

Keywords
Ambidexterity, Team Ambidexterity, Prerequisites, Exploitation, Exploration, Antecedents