Ambidextrous Bureaucracies in Turbulent Policy Environments: How Dynamic Capabilities Drive Public Service Performance

This work explores how dynamic capabilities enable public sector organizations to develop ambidextrous capabilities and enhance their ‎performance despite turbulent policy environments. Applying dynamic capability theory and prevailing work on organizational ambidexterity-‎ty, we explore relationships between dynamic capabilities, organizational ambidexterity, public service performance, and policy turbulence ‎as a moderating variable. Our research adopts data from 286 respondents employed by three separate public service units from SAMSAT ‎settings in Kepulauan Riau Province, Indonesia, and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to assess relationships. ‎We find strong empirical support for all relationships proposed. Somewhat surprisingly, dynamic capabilities strongly enhance organizational ambidexterity and public service performance such that organizational ambidexterity itself serves as a partial mediator between dynamic-‎ic capability and performance (accounting for 34.7% of all effects). Also, policy turbulence emerges as both a direct antecedent to performance and a strong moderator that strengthens the dynamic capabilities-performance relationship under uncertain environments. The model ‎demonstrates high explanatory ability, explaining 64.4% of the variance in organizational performance. Our findings supplement dynamic capability theory in public sector contexts, situate organizational ambidexterity as a mediating mechanism rather than a separate capability, and pro-‎vide support for the contingent value proposition enjoyed by dynamic capabilities. Our work offers actionable implications for public managers ‎in highly interactive policy environments and augments public administration scholarship, synthesizing theory on bureaucratic settings, incorporating ambidexterity theory‎.