Ambidexterity in the Swiss Armed Forces: An Experimental Training Intervention

The ambidexterity of an organization favors its success as well as survival and depends on the ambidexterity of its leaders, meaning their exploration-exploitation decision-making. Unfortunately, we do not know whether and how this ability can be trained. Hence, we will develop and evaluate an exploration-exploitation decision-making training intervention (“intervention”) in the setting of Swiss Armed Forces’ officer schools. In own previous research (Richner et al., 2023), we found that cognitive flexibility predicts the exploration-exploitation decision-making of military officers. Literature outlines that we can best train cognitive flexibility through the increase of meta-cognition about flexible thinking. Thus, we will develop and test an intervention that increases the participants meta-cognition about flexible thinking (IV) and examine its effects on exploration-exploitation decision-making (DV) in the lab and in the field. In doing so, we adopt a pre-post experimental design, whereas the training intervention consists of a mental model about flexibility for the intervention group and objective alignment for the active control group. We train both groups in the use of this model in different task. Target sample size of the intervention and control active group is 100 each. We add a passive control group with a target sample size of 60.