Individual Ambidexterity as a Driver of Career Sustainability in Late Careers

Individual Ambidexterity as a Driver of Career Sustainability in Late Careers: Comparison

Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Perry Fu and Version 1 by Teresa Dieguez.

Individual ambidexterity is the capacity of an individual to engage in both exploration of new knowledge, roles, and opportunities and exploitation of existing skills, experience, and routines in ways that support adaptation and sustained work contribution over time. Amidst the challenges of ageing demographics, digital transformation, and longer working lives, maintaining careers over the long term is becoming increasingly important to people and businesses alike. Individual ambidexterity, as the capacity to combine exploration of new knowledge and opportunities and the use of existing skills and experiences, provides a meaningful framework for thinking about adaptive behavior across career stages. In this article, we integrate insights from the literature on individual ambidexterity with career sustainability, particularly for senior professionals and late-career trajectories. Drawing on research from organizational behavior, leadership, career development, and sustainable careers, the article synthesizes key theoretical foundations, identifies relevant contextual enablers, and highlights emerging research trends. It further examines how leadership, job design, and knowledge management practices shape ambidextrous behavior across extended careers. The framework advanced here is integrative and heuristic rather than predictive. This contribution clarifies how individual ambidexterity may provide the micro-level capability for sustainable careers in ageing and dynamic labor markets by synthesizing fragmented literatures.

individual ambidexterity
senior professionals
leadership
career transition
exploration
exploitation
knowledge management

Individual ambidexterity is an individual’s capacity to engage in both exploration and exploitation activities within their work. Exploration involves behaviors oriented toward experimentation, learning, and the pursuit of new ideas, whereas exploitation focuses on efficiency, refinement, and the application of existing knowledge and skills. This fundamental distinction originates in the seminal work of ^[1], who conceptualized exploration and exploitation as competing yet interdependent modes of learning.

Building on this foundation, research over the past two decades has increasingly conceptualized ambidexterity at the individual level. In this stream, individual ambidexterity is commonly defined as the extent to which employees engage in exploratory and exploitative activities within the same role or across time. Influential contributions by [2,3]^[2][3] emphasize that ambidexterity is enacted through everyday work practices and reflects individuals’ ability to balance continuity and change in response to task and contextual demands.

Contemporary labor markets are characterized by profound demographic, technological, and organizational transformations. Population ageing, extended working lives, and accelerated digitalization have fundamentally altered traditional career patterns, giving rise to more fragmented, non-linear, and prolonged professional trajectories. As a result, organizations increasingly depend on the continued participation of experienced workers, while individuals face growing pressure to remain adaptable, employable, and productive across longer career spans. These dynamics have increased the relevance of career sustainability in organizational research and practice.

Within this context, sustaining a career is no longer understood solely as maintaining employment continuity, but rather as the capacity to remain relevant, engaged, and resilient over time while navigating changing work demands. Recent research emphasizes that sustainable careers depend on the interaction between individual resources, organizational conditions, and broader labor market structures [4,5,6,7]^[4][5][6][7]. For senior professionals and late-career workers, this challenge is particularly salient, as accumulated experience must be continuously reconciled with evolving technologies, work practices, and expectations regarding flexibility and innovation.

Against this backdrop, individual ambidexterity has emerged as a promising conceptual lens for understanding adaptive behavior across career stages. While ambidexterity was initially examined at the organizational level, recent scholarship increasingly highlights the role of employees in simultaneously or sequentially engaging in exploration and exploitation as part of their everyday work [3,8]^[3][8]. More recent studies further suggest that individual ambidexterity supports adaptability, learning, and sustained performance in dynamic environments, particularly under conditions of uncertainty and change [8,9,10]^[8][9][10].

Importantly, emerging research points to the relevance of individual ambidexterity for ageing workforces and late-career contexts, although this connection remains underdeveloped in the literature. Scholars have begun to examine how personal resources such as self-efficacy, proactive personality, and lifelong learning orientation interact with contextual enablers, including leadership styles, innovation climates, and knowledge-sharing practices, to support ambidextrous behavior over time [11,12,13]^[11][12][13]. However, empirical and conceptual integration between ambidexterity research and the sustainable careers literature remains limited, particularly regarding professional reintegration, post-retirement work, and late-career transitions.

This article addresses this gap by synthesizing and integrating research on individual ambidexterity and career sustainability, with a specific focus on senior professionals and later career stages. By consolidating fragmented theoretical insights, mapping dominant research trends, and presenting an integrative conceptual framework, the entry aims to clarify how individual ambidexterity functions as an adaptive capability that supports sustained organizational participation and professional renewal across extended working lives. The sections that follow examine the conceptual foundations of individual ambidexterity, its relevance for career sustainability, and the contextual conditions under which ambidextrous behavior can be fostered throughout the career life course.

This entry considers the encyclopedia not just as a dissemination medium but as a knowledge-management artefact that informs individuals’ ways of accessing, validating, and integrating knowledge over more extended career paths.

Scope and Review Approach

The article adopts an integrative and narrative review approach appropriate for encyclopedia submissions and synthesis of theoretical content. This is not an exhaustive systematic review, but a consolidation and interpretation of key strands of literature on individual ambidexterity and career sustainability, with an emphasis on late-career stages and senior professionals.

Three inclusion principles guided the selection of the literature: (1) conceptual and empirical works in the areas of exploration, exploitation, ambidexterity or contextual ambidexterity at the individual or leadership levels; (2) studies in the field of sustainable careers, career development, ageing at work, and late-career transitions; (3) recent works, especially those published from 2020 onwards, which captured contemporary developments while preserving earlier foundational works that were, theoretically, essential, such as March’s distinction between exploration and exploitation.

Studies were excluded if they were not directly relevant to the article’s underlying argument, if the citations did not explicitly support the discussion of individual ambidexterity or career sustainability, or if they were redundant with respect to more relevant sources. The synthesis was based on an interpretive logic; convergence in organizational behavior, leadership, career studies, and knowledge management is identified, as is the development of the integrative conceptual framework presented later in the article.

References

March, J.G. Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organ. Sci. 1991, 2, 71–87.
Mom, T.J.; Van Den Bosch, F.A.; Volberda, H.W. Investigating managers’ exploration and exploitation activities: The influence of top-down, bottom-up, and horizontal knowledge inflows. J. Manag. Stud. 2007, 44, 910–931.
Mom, T.J.; Fourné, S.P.; Jansen, J.J. Managers’ work experience, ambidexterity, and performance: The contingency role of the work context. Hum. Resour. Manag. 2015, 54, s133–s153.
De Vos, A.; Van der Heijden, B.I.J.M.; Akkermans, J. Sustainable careers: Towards a conceptual model. Sustainable Careers across the Lifespan: A Contemporary Perspective. J. Vocat. Behav. 2020, 117, 103196.
Jacobs, S.; Akkermans, J.; Van der Heijden, B.; De Vos, A. Career sustainability in the gig economy: A delicate balancing act. In Research Handbook of Careers in the Gig Economy; Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham, UK, 2025; pp. 51–66.
Akkermans, J.; Kubasch, S. Trending topics in careers: A review and future research agenda. Career Dev. Int. 2017, 22, 586–627.
Donald, W.E.; Van der Heijden, B.I.; Baruch, Y. Introducing a sustainable career ecosystem: Theoretical perspectives, conceptualization, and future research agenda. J. Vocat. Behav. 2024, 151, 103989.
Birkinshaw, J.; Gupta, K. Clarifying the distinctive contribution of ambidexterity to the field of organization studies. Acad. Manag. Perspect. 2013, 27, 287–298.
Varandas, C.; Fernandes, C.I.; Veiga, P.M. Human resource management in ambidextrous organisations―A systematic literature review. Technol. Soc. 2024, 77, 102504.
Zhou, Q.; Wang, S.; Wang, L.; Xu, W. Knowledge governance and innovation ambidexterity in the platform context: Exploring the role of knowledge transformation. J. Knowl. Manag. 2025, 29, 1301–1329.
Ceptureanu, S.I.; Ferraro, G.; Ceptureanu, E.G.; Georgescu, B. Individual learning ambidexterity behavior and individual job performance in services: The role of organizational structure. Rev. Manag. Sci. 2024, 19, 1–36.
Khairi, S.M.M.; Rozali, N.; Sobry, S.C.; Nor, N.M. Fostering Resilience in Cooperative Employees: Evaluating the role of Ability, Motivation, and Opportunity (AMO). Environ. Behav. Proc. J. 2025, 10, 179–186.
Zacher, H.; Rudolph, C.W. Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety. Clim. Change 2023, 176, 32.