This article explores how organizational ambidexterity—the ability to balance exploration (searching for new opportunities) and exploitation (refining existing capabilities)—emerges from the interpersonal dynamics within a founding team.

The authors use an exploratory case study of 15 founding teams, based on interviews and observations, to decipher how one founder's exploration or exploitation behavior influences the behavior of their co-founders.

The findings identify two key interpersonal response mechanisms that shape the team's ambidexterity:

Mimicking: Co-founders often replicate an initial exploitation behavior, which can promote alignment and shared mental models, but may also lead to inefficiencies through overlapping work.

Switching: Co-founders often exhibit a contrarian response (switching) to initial exploration behavior, dynamically altering their strategy to complement or reject the stimulus. Switching can enable complementary team-wide processes, such as fostering diverse perspectives and robust decision-making, helping to convert exploration into reliable outcomes.

The study contributes to the literature on ambidexterity by connecting individual-level behaviors to emergent team processes, revealing the opportunities and threats these social interaction patterns create for founding teams attempting to be ambidextrous.

The full article is available open access: here