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Introduction
Today organizations are traditionally engaged in change, especially to react to the dynamic environment, dominated by extreme competition, increasing customer needs and the extraordinary technologies-introduction rate. Particularly, in order to reach a sustainable competitive advantage, the literature has focused on ambidexterity as one of the most important theoretical concepts related to organization performance. Ambidexterity is the ability to reach an efficient equilibrium between exploration, or innovation-related activities, and exploitation, or refinement-related activities (Andriopoulos and Lewis, 2009; Gupta et al., 2006). The concept of ambidexterity is well established in the literature; however, there is a lack of empirical evidence related to its implementation, especially in project-oriented context. Starting from this research gap, the present study aims to describe how ambidexterity can be achieved by analyzing the main processes that influence its implementation. Particularly, it analyses the main contextual variables (Vom Brocke et al., 2016) underlying an ambidexterity project, implemented through a business process management (BPM) approach, based on two of its main influencing practices (Ravesteyn and Batenburg, 2010), namely total quality management (TQM) and business process re-engineering (BPR) (Nadarajah and Latifah Syed Abdul Kadir, 2014). The paper is structured as follows. In the next section we present the research background and the literature review. We then provide the research context and method as explanations of the data collection and analysis used in the study. Next, we describe the conceptual framework and main findings from the empirical analysis. Finally, we present the discussion and conclusion by highlighting the limitations of the study.
Research background: ambidexterity and BPM approach
Ambidexterity is one of the most important concepts related to organizational performance (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2013), as it is strongly connected to sustainable competitive advantage (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2008). The concept of ambidexterity describes the firm’s capacity to simultaneously pursue the tensions between exploration and exploitation (March, 1991). Such tensions represent a conflicting issue (Smith and Lewis, 2011) but also an opportunity both to prevent organizations from the exploitation success trap, that strengthens and exacerbates organizational inertia (Benner and Tushman, 2002), by limiting the responsiveness to environmental shifts, as well as the exploration failure trap, that lacks concrete short-term results being oriented to search for innovation, and focused on search and experimentation for a long-term survival...