Individual ambidexterity is of crucial importance for organisations, especially SMEs, to respond quickly and effectively to market trends and maintain a competitive edge. However, in literature, a number of different terms and definitions have been used to refer to the concept of individual ambidexterity. In addition, the conceptualisation is often derived from organisational ambidexterity and does not capture how ambidexterity manifests itself at the individual level and how employees develop and manage ambidexterity at an individual level. To gain a deeper understanding of how ambidexterity is enacted at the individual level, this PhD project aims at establishing conceptual clarity as well as developing a measurement scale of individual ambidexterity, and exploring how cultural values affect the nomological network of individual ambidexterity. Thus, this dissertation aims to accomplish the following:
- To gain insight about how individuals perform explorative and exploitative tasks, either simultaneously or sequentially, while keeping a balance between the two types of tasks, or in a combined effort.
- To incorporate this interplay between exploration and exploitation into the measurement of individual ambidexterity by developing and validating a new scale.
- To gain knowledge of how individuals from different cultural backgrounds differ in their ambidextrous behaviours.
Ting Mu was born on 20th May 1991 in Boxing, Shandong Province, China. Prior to coming to the Netherlands, she obtained her Master’s degree with recommendation in Management and International Business from Nottingham Business School in the UK in 2013. In September 2016, Ting started her PhD research at the Institute for Management Research (IMR) of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on ambidexterity at the individual level and its nomological network, and her dissertation explores this very concept, trying to clarify its conceptualisation, operationalise it based on a clearer conceptualisation, and further test the new operationalisation in international contexts namely the Netherlands and China. During her PhD, Ting was also involved in supervising bachelor theses for (International) Business Administration and master theses for the research focus group Entrepreneurship and Innovation.