Automation, organizational ambidexterity and the stability of employee relations: new tensions arising between corporate entrepreneurship, innovation management and stakeholder management

Abstract

While previous entrepreneurship research has only seldom drawn on organizational ambidexterity, the analysis of the important contemporary tensions among entrepreneurship, innovation management and strategic management issues may be facilitated by more closely analysing organizational ambidexterity in entrepreneurial settings. In this paper, we follow this thinking and more closely analyse an often applied form of corporate entrepreneurship: automation. Such automation is transferring work that was formerly conducted by humans to machines and may thus result in new tensions between corporate entrepreneurship, innovation management and the management of organizational stakeholders such as employees. The present paper investigates whether increased automation lowers the stability of firms’ relationships with their employees. In addition, we expect that this relationship is moderated by organizational ambidexterity, as employees may have perceived ambidexterity as a signal that their firm will not overly invest in exploitation only, but maintain a balance between exploitation and exploration. Drawing on stakeholder theory, previous insights into corporate entrepreneurship and a survey of German Mittelstand firms, our findings show that highly ambidextrous firms are indeed more vulnerable to automation, leading to lower employee relational stability. Our findings thus suggest that in highly ambidextrous firms, novel tensions around automation-related corporate entrepreneurship will be detrimental to the stability of the firm’s relations with one of its key stakeholder groups: employees.

Inovação Exploitation e Exploration

“…Para atender as necessidades de mercado as organizações precisam buscar constantemente por inovação (Hiebl & Pielsticker, 2023). Tidd e Bessant (2015) indicam que a inovação é a criação de algo.…”

“…Segundo Lennon (2022), Hiebl & Pielsticker (2023) e Lee e Hemmert (2023), a inovação ambidestra também é utilizada como estratégia para diminuir os custos de produção, devido ao fato de a tecnologia proporcionar à empresa maiores controles e processos mais mecanizados. Desta forma, as empresas aumentam as vendas e por consequência seus lucros por meio da diminuição dos custos (Shen et al, 2023;Erzurumlu & Smith, 2023).…”

“…Pesquisas têm demostrado que nos processos organizacionais os modelos de inovação exploitation e exploration podem fazer com que os gestores rivalizem por recursos organizacionais, embora ao mesmo tempo tenham o potencial de serem complementares (Van Neerijnen et al, 2022;Hiebl & Pielsticker, 2023;Lee e Hemmert, 2023;Shen et al, 2023). Os gestores da organização incorporam uma tensão entre exploitation e exploration por meio de quadros cognitivos incompatíveis que fundamentam essas atividades opostas (Sabidussi et al, 2021;Nie et al, 2022).…”

“…A inovação exploitation ou inovação incremental exige eficiência e pensamento convergente para aproveitar as capacidades e a criatividade dos gestores com intuito de melhorar continuamente a oferta de produtos (Bresciani et al, 2018;Zheng et al, 2023). Enquanto o modelo de inovação exploration ou inovação radical envolve esforços de busca, variação e experimentação para gerar novas recombinações de conhecimento (Keller & Chen, 2017;Bresciani et al, 2018;Hiebl & Pielsticker, 2023).…”

Information systems quality in management accounting and management control effectiveness

“…In addition, we examine the potential moderating role of process automation. Due to the changing business environment and advances in robotics and information technology (IT), many companies have been increasing the automation of their production processes (Autor, 2015; Hiebl and Pielsticker, 2022, 2023; van Veen-Dirks, 2005). Due to process automation, many tasks can be performed by computers or machines, eliminating control problems that can occur when humans carry out work (Autor, 2015; Merchant and van der Stede, 2017).…”