“Hard Systems, Soft Foundations”: How Human Resource Management and Intellectual Capital enable ambidexterity. An analysis based on the EFQM Model

Abstract

This DBA thesis addresses the challenge of building organizational ambidexterity as a dynamic capability in response to VUCA environments. Organizations increasingly must balance and deliver performance (exploitation) and transformation and innovation (exploration) simultaneously to compete and achieve sustainable results. The existing literature broadly explains what ambidexterity is but offers limited empirical insight into how organizations build and consolidate this capability in practice, particularly from an HRM and intellectual capital perspective. This research gap is addressed in this DBA thesis through three interrelated research questions, grouped around how HR practices and intellectual capital configurations enable ambidexterity. The thesis follows a mixed-methods research design combining large-scale AI-assisted content and thematic analysis in NVivo with quantitative prioritization of IC factors impacting ambidexterity through the ANP method, with an expert focus group. The dataset is based on 250 Spanish organizations that follow the EFQM Model. The key findings show a preponderance of management practices oriented to invest in formal “hard” systems that reinforce exploitation and performance. Interestingly, expert practitioners identify relational capital factors as the most critical drivers of ambidexterity, highlighting a misalignment between actual organizational investment and managerial prioritization. This divergence is conceptualized as “inversion of value”. This DBA thesis proposes that organizational ambidexterity should be understood as a capability-building process emerging from the recursive interaction between “hard” systems and “soft” cultural and relational mechanisms. Hard systems trigger and scale ambidexterity, while the soft relational mechanisms mediate learning, adoption, and sustainability of ambidexterity, building capability.