Individual Ambidexterity and Management Controls – A Systematic Literature Review

Purpose – According to Merchant and Van der Stede (2017), top managers use management controls to increase the likelihood that employees will act in the best interests of the organization. Nowadays, increasing numbers of companies expect their employees to perform well simultaneously on exploitation and exploration. This is referred to as individual ambidexterity (e.g., Mom et al., 2019). Due to the increasing importance of the topic, the main purpose of the present article is to summarize findings from top tier management journals and to detect findings with implications for result, action, and personnel/cultural controls.

Methodology – We apply a structured approach to detect the most relevant studies for our examination and search for ambidexterity and ambidextrous in title, abstract, and keywords. The final sample consists of 45 articles published in top tier management journals, including all subfields.

Findings – In the first step, we provide an overview of both methods and theories used to study individual ambidexterity. In a second step, we summarize and analyze the insights on how organizations can use results, action, and personnel/cultural controls to enable individuals to achieve higher ambidextrous performance. In the final step, we highlight directions for future research with the hope of motivating further research from scholars in the management accounting field to address this relevant topic.

Originality – Given the increasing importance of ambidexterity, the present study introduces the relevant concepts and definitions and translates existing research into the language of management control. We therefore facilitate future research on this highly relevant topic within the management accounting field.