What Are the Experiences of the Ambidextrous Form of Strategic Change Management within the Life Insurance Industry?

Since January 2017 the writer is the chairman of a Swiss insurance group which faces strategic challenges which are economic driven (cost and margin pressure) and at the same time require organisational development (lack of innovation to adjust core client offer to changing client needs). For this kind of business challenges the ambidextrous form of strategic change management has been developed. The objective of the study is to empirically observe, whether companies in general and specifically in life insurance industry have applied this change management approach and what were the results. Design/methodology/approach:The methodology applied is a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). It is focused on the following Research Question (RQ): what the experiences of companies in areapplying ambidextrous strategic change a.) overall and b.) within the insurance industry. The search was restricted to peer-viewed, English language, scholary journal articles. All published and accessible journal publications, working papers and conference papers that matched the selection criteria were considered. Findings:Based on this researchit became clear that mostly technology intensive or manufacturing oriented companies have applied the ambidextrous path of strategic change with a positive financial performance. With respect to the life insurance industry the SLR showed that much evidence could be found that the challenges of the life insurance industry normally requirethe application of this concept, but however no specific empirical study could be found which describes the application of it. Research/practical implications:The SLR suggests (1) further academic work on application of the concept in service industries, e.g. banking to better understand if the life insurance industry can learn from them. On top the writer recommends to (2) specify more clearly how (steps, components, tools) the ambidextrous change management approach has been applied incl. results achieved. Furthermore,the writer suggests to (3) develop a more customized conceptual ambidextrous change management approach for the life insurance industry and (4) validates it by a scientific research on the application within a case study. Originality/value:The life insurance industry overall and not only the writer’s company face new, huge and complex challenges. For these challenges the ambidextrous change management has been developed by Tushman and O’Reilly. The research showed that this concept has been widely applied in technology intensive industries with positive results. Therefore, managers and researches in the life insurance can now learn from these experiences andhelp to solve toady’s challenges of their companies and the industry.