Different Strategies for Different Fields? Exploration, Exploitation, Ambidexterity, and the Performance of Self-Employed Musicians

We contribute to the advancement of a contingent view of ambidexterity by examining exploration and exploitation across product and market domains in a sample of Canadian self-employed musicians. We find that (1) groups of musicians are more likely to benefit from ambidexterity than individual self-employed musicians, (2) group performance is more positively related to cross-functional rather than within-functional ambidexterity, and (3) a single strategic emphasis based on either product exploitation or market exploration is more positively related to the individual performance of classical musicians, that is, the performance effects of single strategic emphases depend upon the institutional field at the individual level.