Building affective commitment in a financial institution through an ambidexterity context

Purpose: Ambidexterity refers to the tension between two different business models within the same organisation. This paper examines the significance of individuals' knowledge exploration and exploitation activities in an organisation’s ambidexterity context, along with how they affect the creation of an affective commitment in the workforce. The study then investigates how an organisation’s ambidexterity context contributes to employees' affective commitment to learning.
Design: These relationships are examined through an empirical investigation of 219 employees in the financial sector, using structural equation modelling validated by factor analysis.
Findings: The results indicate that in order to be ambidextrous, managers need to address an ambidexterity context, so could happen simultaneously explorative and exploitative activities. Another interesting contribution of this study has been questioning how explorative and exploitative activities are linked to affective commitment and the respective weight placed upon each of them. The results suggest that while the effect of the ambidexterity context on the affective commitment by way of explorative activities is statistically insignificant, the effects of exploitative activities on affective commitment are statistically significant.
Originality: While the relationship between contextual ambidexterity and organisational performance has been researched, the relationship between ambidexterity and affective commitment is less researched. The research has shown that an ambidexterity context is a key component of the process of combining knowledge in a way that is both appropriate for exploring value to the company and effective in exploiting its memory.