Organizational ambidexterity is commonly framed as the capacity to sustain exploration while exploiting established capabilities, yet this formulation under-specifies what happens inside organizations when the two activities require different structures, identities, coordination patterns, and criteria for commitment. Differentiation can protect experimentation, but it can also increase coordination burdens, weaken shared interpretations of organizational purpose, and complicate the conversion of exploratory initiatives into operating routines. This conceptual article develops an evidence-bounded organizational ambidexterity model in which innovation depends not only on maintaining exploration and exploitation, but on aligning four analytically distinct conditions: exploratory variety, coordination capacity, identity coherence, and implementation discipline. Identity coherence is defined here as the capacity to sustain an intelligible organizational relationship among competing innovation logics without requiring cultural homogeneity. Implementation discipline denotes selective commitment, resource allocation, transfer, and integration processes through which promising innovation is converted into organizational action. The resulting exploration–coherence paradox explains why arrangements that protect exploratory difference may simultaneously increase fragmentation risk. The model further distinguishes productive differentiation from three proposed failure states: fragmentation, rigidity, and innovation drift. Its contribution is configurational rather than prescriptive: different organizations may sustain ambidexterity through different structural and cultural mechanisms, and no configuration is assumed to be universally superior. The model remains non-empirical and requires longitudinal, multilevel, and comparative validation before its proposed relationships can be treated as established organizational mechanisms or managerial prescriptions.
