The Effect of Employees Ambidexterity and Workaholism on Perceived Employability ‘An Empirical Study on the Private Banking Sector in Egypt’

Abstract

For a long time now firms have been constantly pressured to think beyond satisfying the existing customers i.e. that is to go beyond what is expected and anticipate any changes that could occur in customer needs (Holmqvist and Spicer, 2012). Employees are challenged to explore new possibilities within their current work status and at the same time to exploit old facilities to meet the on-going business demands (March, 1991), which is usually referred to as Ambidexterity. This research declares that employees who are usually explorative and exploitative will usually tend to be more involved and work more than their fellow colleagues, i.e. that they sometimes experience an uncontrollable need to work intensively. This relates well with the next variable which is called Workholism as defined by Oats in (1971). However, there is still no specific agreement about its meaning and conceptualization (McMillan & O’Driscoll, 2006). It is usually considered as being a negative drawback in some research and inversely as a positive attribute. Finally, comes the notion of Perceived Employability that has received considerable attention from research and as far as the researcher knows is considered as relatively new work behaviours. It is usually referred to as ‘An individual’s chance of a job on the internal and/or external labour market’’ (Forrier & Sels, 2003).