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Acknowledgments:We are grateful to Gianmario Verona for his editorial guidance and the three anonymous reviewers for their developmental reviews. We also thank Kamini Gupta for useful comments. Furthermore, we wish to thank Tom Mom for feedback on a previous version of the manuscript, as well as the participants of the EURAM 2014 track 'The microfoundations of organizational ambidexterity: Multilevel insights'. 2 AbstractThis article contributes to our understanding of organizational ambidexterity by introducing conflict as its microfoundation. Existing research distinguishes between three approaches to how organizations can be ambidextrous, i.e. engage in both exploitation and exploration.They may sequentially shift the strategic focus of the organization over time; they may establish structural arrangements enabling the simultaneous pursuit of being both exploitative and explorative; or they may provide a supportive organizational context for ambidextrous behavior. However, we know little about how exactly ambidexterity is accomplished and managed. We argue that ambidexterity is a dynamic and conflict-laden phenomenon, and we locate conflict at the level of organizations, units, and individuals. We develop the argument that conflicts in social interaction serve as the microfoundation to organizing ambidexterity, but that their function and type vary across the different approaches toward ambidexterity. The perspective developed in this paper opens up promising research avenues to examine how organizations purposefully manage ambidexterity.

This paper contributes to process studies on organizational creativity by developing two competing research agendas. The first perspective, the ‘becoming’ view, depicts creativity as a constant flow of activity that crystallizes every once in a while in unpredictable moments of creativity. The second perspective, the ‘practice’ view, understands creativity as a practised social process, in which structures play the important role of both enabling and constraining individual agents in pursuing creativity as a collective phenomenon. We compare and contrast these two theoretical perspectives, which are based on different process ontologies, and discuss their methodological implications. We argue that the practice perspective offers particular promise, because it allows us to address the important yet paradoxical question of how creativity may be organized and managed.

If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.