Horizontal and Vertical Interpersonal Processes of Middle Managers and Business Unit Ambidexterity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although scholars have developed structural and contextual perspectives in research on organizational ambidexterity, little is known about more direct ways in which middle managers (MMs) responsible for business units (BUs) address challenges associated with pursuing exploration and exploitation simultaneously within their BUs. Drawing on and extending research on MMs’ work relationships, we examine how different horizontal and vertical interpersonal processes among MMs and with corporate top managers (TMs) contribute to ambidexterity at BUs. Importantly, we reveal that the relationship of horizontal knowledge exchange among MMs and BU ambidexterity depends on the specific quality of vertical interpersonal processes as integrative bargaining complements and cognitive flexibility undermines this relationship. Our results have implications for our understanding about the joint involvement of middle and top managers in executing complex strategies in multi-unit organizations. Moreover, this study provides guidance for MMs to leverage the complementarities of horizontal boundary-spanning and vertical interpersonal processes while avoiding the pitfalls of engaging in both.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".