Self-Managing Team and Individual Ambidexterity: A Micro-Level Study

Drifting away from the conception that management can directly influence individual behavior and cognition within teams, we argue that, in post-bureaucratic organizations relying on self-managing teams, the understanding of how the team context influence the learning orientation of individuals with different dispositions is a key priority to study. By analyzing antecedents of individual learning orientation, we explored conditions for individual level ambidexterity, defined as the capacity for individuals to simultaneously exploit and explore new knowledge at level of team. Through data collected from 104 individuals working in a R&D organization, we found that team context is created and renewed through the effect of formal and emerging organizational practices relying on people interactions between the inside and outside the team’s boundaries. Integrating insights from social network theory into the individual learning literature, we demonstrated the importance of brokerage position for individuals’ self-efficacy and, in turn, for their learning goal orientation. Hence, we extent previous studies showing that different position in both expressive and instrumental network would affect individual’s self-efficacy.