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Projects, as the common unit of organizing complex tasks, often feature unique challenges that require both radical innovation and incremental improvements to processes and solutions in order to deliver the project within constraints. Both exploration and exploitation are likely to be needed for complex engineering projects to succeed. This study, through an in-depth case study of a complex infrastructure project facing unique challenges and tight budget and schedule, investigates the antecedents of ambidexterity and the effect of ambidexterity on project performance. The main contributions of this research include finding: (1) ambidexterity at the project team level to be a significant contributor to project performance; (2) the effects of temporal separation and project context on project performance are mediated by the project team's degree of ambidexterity; and (3) contrary to the prediction from organizational literature, structural separation has not contributed to the case project team's ambidexterity. The authors believe that among the three antecedents for ambidexterity at the project level as predicted by organizational literature, structural separation is rendered ineffective by the natural cycling between exploration and exploitation in the project environment and by the need to integrate the two under time pressure and resource constraints. The development of an effective project context can facilitate the temporal cycling between exploration and exploitation by creating awareness that overcomes the inertia in transitioning between the two by setting performance expectations and appropriate social context. Implications for theory development and practice are discussed.

This research study investigated the principal's role as instructional manager, its relationship to student achievement, and how principals influence teachers to accomplish the school's goal of increasing student learning. Conceptually, principal instructional management includes those processes, both mental and physical, that the principal uses which result in other people executing formal and informal duties to achieve organizational goals. It deals mainly with planning, organizing and controlling teacher behavior to achieve organizational goals, but also includes monitoring and controlling resources. Subjects for the study included elementary school (K‐8) principals and teachers in 27 schools. Student achievement gain was determined by regression analysis where current achievement was regressed on prior achievement and SES for two years of data. Principal instructional management behavior was measured by a modified form of the Instructional Management Rating Scales, or IMRS (Hallinger, 1983). ...