Twentieth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

An increasing trend toward the use of big data and predictive analytics may provide promising insights as to how ambidexterity continuity and ambidexterity shift (i.e., the need to balance or knowing when to shift between exploitation and exploration) as a change process can occur in organizations, specific to the use of evidence-based management (EBM). In the context of sport management, and in particular to Major League Baseball (MLB), there is a need to understand how sport managers can build ambidexterity as a dynamic capability to effectively leverage data to sense, seize, and reconfigure resources, in this case talent, to respond and drive internal and external change. Thus, we leverage the lens of organizational ambidexterity as applied to data-driven practice by 1) extending Jackson and Leung’s (2018) four-quadrant Evidence-Based Management Practices (EBM) for Ambidextrous Organizations framework (i.e., transformative, symbiotic, projective, preservative strategies) to draw comparisons to MLB organizations and 2) identifying where sport managers may succeed or could improve responses to episodic and continuous change events facing their organizations. Specifically, we implement a case study approach to conceptually map various leadership practices and ambidexterity strategies, while also examining how teams use data to oscillate between exploration and exploitation to inform this gap in the literature. To our knowledge, we offer the first application of the strategies from the EBM Practices for Ambidextrous Organizations to a sports context.