Researchers' Ambidexterity: The Duality of Exploratory Orientation and Exploitative Orientation and Its Relationship with Personality and the Impact on Research Performance

This study aims to explore the relationship among researchers' personality, researchers' ambidexterity, and their research performance. Ambidexterity describes someone's ability to use both hands with equal ease. And in the field of management, ambidexterity refers to the ability of organizations to simultaneously explore new capabilities and exploit existing competences. Although this concept has been established as an important antecedent of organizational innovation and performance, it is still unclear how organizational best strive for ambidexterity and even how this concept be best understood. Recently, researchers have started to argue that ambidexterity is not only essential at the organizational level, but also at the individual level. However, research on individual ambidexterity is still in its infancy. This paper is to explore the relationship between individuals' personality and individuals' ambidexterity. In particular, we identify individual who is a researcher from university or private enterprise. Data collected from 202 researchers in Japan. Then we examined the effect of researchers' personality-captured using FFM's big five factors-on both the researchers' exploratory orientation, exploitative orientation and ambidextrous orientation which is measured in three items each. And we operationalized our dependent variable, research performance in two different ways: the number of journal publications and amount of research expenses received in one year. We also included several control variables in our analyses like the English ability, years of experience as a researcher, years of research career and the number of members in the research team. We used SEM (structural equation modeling) for our analyses and observe the significant relationship between researchers' personality, researchers' ambidexterity and the impact on research performance.