Janus Rising: Information Technology Role in Facilitation of Organizational Ambidexterity and Identity

Information Technology (IT) permits new organizational possibilities - tolerating and thriving in complex organizational settings that result from the election of conflicting strategic objectives. As a critical resource in today's knowledge-driven, hypercompetitive environment, IT accrues several indirect benefits through intermediate value-creating organizational processes. Tolerating strategic tensions generated by competing demands on organizational attention and resources is one such process. The quest to attain competitive advantage through the concurrent pursuit of seemingly conflicting strategies or identities is a major source of these tensions. This dissertation examines the role of information systems in facilitating organizational ambidexterity and managing multiple organizational identities. In the first component, I selected to gather data from 352 manufacturing firms in high growth sectors in India - a novel empirical setting which provides an exemplar for the world's enterprises undergoing rapid structural changes in the 21st century. I find strong support for my assertion that an organization's IT resources and capabilities facilitate organizational ambidexterity, hitherto a challenging competitive possibility. In the second component, I examine the role of IT in enhancing post-acquisition integration of externally acquired explorative or exploitative innovation. I extend March's Exploration-Exploitation model in the context of acquisitions by introducing IT-enabled learning mechanisms. I offer theoretical propositions and find that post-acquisition integration strategies and IT-enabled learning mechanisms have different, but complementary impacts. In the third component of this dissertation research, I assert a causal model of IT capability in the management of multiple identities. I then develop a computer simulation model and find that an organization's IT capability leads to highest performance increases under conditions of low identity plurality, low identity synergy and low IT capability. Overall, I show that IT enables the management of seemingly paradoxical challenges that arise in the tolerance of the complexity inherent in effectively resolving strategic tensions. The results from this dissertation contribute towards a theory of IT-enabled management of strategic tensions and inform our understanding of the complex relationships and theoretical pathways from IT to competitive advantage. I validate the viability of IT-enabled organizational ambidexterity and IT-enabled management of multiple identities as competitive possibilities emergent in the 21st century.