Exploratory and exploitative project management: how product and engineering managers' perceptions differ: a case of two large high-tech corporations

Ambidexterity has been a focus for many researchers in the past few decades. and multiple angles of ambidexterity have been studied to understand how to achieve it, its antecedents, and its impact on organisations. While personal ambidexterity has been studied with respect to the tensions the individuals might experience as they juggle exploratory and exploitative innovation projects, little is known about their individual sensemaking prior to their exercise of ambidexterity. This paper aims at narrowing this gap in the literature by offering an insight, based on personal construct theory, as to why managers from product management and engineering management functions in software organisations may not be applying exploratory techniques on exploratory innovation projects. A key finding from this research indicates that managers do not differentiate between types of project in a sufficiently explicit and propositional manner, and as a result, do not choose techniques appropriate to the situation. Instead, they tend to apply exploitative techniques on exploratory innovation projects with slight variations. Recommendations to practitioners to address the issues uncovered are proposed.