earticle

영어

Individual ambidexterity is about individual behavioural capacity to balance and coexist two extreme ambidextrous activities such as exploitation of existing competencies and exploration of new opportunities, meanwhile organizational ambidexterity indicates the ability of an organization to simultaneously pursue the paradoxical strategies of exploitation and exploration. In the context of personal characteristics that inspire positive expectations on the part of other individuals, trustworthiness empirically explaining up to 80% of trust intention is defined as the perceived level of trustworthy characteristics and action of the trustee and is determined mainly by three characteristics of the trustee such as ability, benevolence, and integrity. Assuming individuals exhibit secure attitudes and competent behaviour to balance exploration and exploitation activities in a daily working life, the aim is to answer the following main research questions: First, is individual ambidexterity always consistent regardless of market situation? Second, is there different pattern in the relationship between the perceived trustworthiness of coworkers and the individual ambidexterity at the particular market situation? The statistical analyses were performed 1) to compare the level of individual ambidexterity between two seasons and 2) analyze the influence of individual dimensions of trustworthiness on individual ambidexterity at each season. In the factor analysis and regression analysis using data from employees working at 4 global IT-based electronics companies, the significance of reliability and validity of factors were statistically confirmed with SPSS 21 and AMOS 21 software. As a result, off season entailing the more balanced activities of exploitation and exploration has the higher level of individual ambidexterity, compared to peak season entailing the less balanced activities. It is believed that the ambidextrous structure and self-regulation are the core drivers of the balanced individual ambidexterity in that their organizations have operated the two functional structures of R&D divisions and manufacturing divisions separately and individuals are given, to some extent, the authority of decision-making in the ways of their activities due to the temporal characteristics. Individual ambidexterity is significantly related to only ability dimension in the off season whereas both benevolence and integrity dimension significantly influence individual ambidexterity in the peak season. It indicates that individual ambidexterity can be enhanced by the different dimensions of trustworthiness depending on the market situation. Therefore, this study showed that trustworthiness perceived from coworkers and temporal effect are influential in determining individual ambidexterity. In the academical perspectives, this study is a case pertaining to the availability of individual ambidexterity instrument as a set of ambidextrous behaviours at the individual level, rather than one pair of ambidextrous forms to represent individual ambidexterity. This approach may help explain individual ambidexterity better by taking specific behaviours as a whole rather than measuring exploration and exploitation separately. In the perspectives of (dis)trust management, distrust management is needed to improve individual ambidexterity in the off season characterizing the unstable production schedule with irregular market demand whereas trust management is needed to facilitate individual ambidexterity in the peak season. As a caveat to the interpretation of research results, note that the pattern of differential significance of trustworthiness on individual ambidexterity should not be understood as suggesting that trust leads to the equivalent pattern in usual situations.