The Effect of Job Characteristics on Organizational Ambidexterity: Insight from Jordan

The purpose of this study is to identify the effect of Job Characteristics on organizational ambidexterity. The study population involves Food and beverages companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange (2020) which numbered (8) companies. The study sample includes (120) employees. The questionnaire was gathered from (100) respondents and shaped 83% as a response rate. The obtained data have been analyzed by the partial Least Squares (PLS) technique. The current study showed that all the dimensions of the Job Characteristics namely (Skills variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback) have a positive impact on organizational ambidexterity. The study recommends increasing the job characteristics levels and the organizational ambidexterity levels in the researched companies. In addition, it recommends the future researchers complete this study on the other sectors.

Previous studies were conducted to examine the impact of job characteristics on other variables such as work engagement, the resource on person-job fit, employee emotions, and work-related outcomes and employee acceptance of process standardization (Abuzaid, 2020;Adiarani, 2019;Montgomery, 2017;Chaudhry, Maurice, & Haneefuddin, 2015;Kettenbohrer, Beimborn &Eckhardt, 2015).While the current study intends to examine the effect of the job characteristics model in building organizational ambidexterity. Therefore, the current study tries to answer the following question: Q: What is the effect of the job characteristics on organizational ambidexterity?

Job Characteristics
According to  job characteristics are closely related to the job and contain several components or elements that may lead to the formation of a comprehensive understanding of the job, a sense of the impact of work, and responsibility for the results to create a climate for a positive courtesy of employees and impact on employee participation. Job characteristics are considered as one of the most important parts or approaches of job design (Matilu &K'Obonyo, 2018), the origin of the development of the job characteristics model goes back to researchers turner and Lawrence in 1965 which has been reviewed by Hackman and Lawler in 1971 an then the final version revised and done by Hackman and Oldham in1976. Accordingly, the firm must be able to provide a suitable work environment that assists to match employee's needs during job design (Adiarani, 2019). Therefore, the job should design very well to provide the benefits and might increase the organization and employee's commitment (Tamhir, Sujanto &Karnati, 2019). Job Characteristics are considered as the factor that explains the characteristics of a job that differentiate between one occupation with other forms of the job (Senen, Sumiyati &Masharyono, 2016). Job characteristics theory assumed that job is considered as a situational force affecting the employees' behavioral and psychological status and it will be enriching and encouraging work performance (Johari &Yahya, 2016). Besides, the model of job characteristics developed by Hackman and Oldham in 1976 mentioned a group of essential job characteristics that affects the actions and behaviors of the employees that clues to numerous positive outputs such as reduced rate of job turnover, enhance and the motivation of employees and performance quality (Abuzaid, 2020).
Based on the literature above, the researcher will be considered the followings dimensions of the job characteristic model according to (Hackman &Oldham, 1976) as follows:

Skills Variety
Hackman &Oldham (1974) described the variety of the skills as a degree of job requirements of the set different activities in implementing out the work, that include the use of the number of many talents and skills of an individual. Therefore, the skills variety dimension is very useful for the employees because it will lead the employees to a feeling of great capability and the organizations will keep the employees by abolishing the boredom which resulted from the repetitive work tasks and activities (Adiarani, 2019). It can be defined as the facilities required by employees to own numerous abilities, skills and Knowledge (Garg &Rastogi, 2006).

Task Identity
The task identity inspires and enhances the feeling in which the job is expressive and valuable and this will stimulate the workers to work cleverly (Coelho &Augusto, 2010). Accordingly, when the employees implement the whole job as well as planned from the point start to the endpoint, this means that the task is very clear and each employee within the organization knows their role very well (Abuzaid, 2020). It can be defined as the ability to identify the current work in which it more complete and holistic, and thus will lead to more pride in the job outcomes performed by a particular person (Johari &Yahya, 2016). Moreover, it refers to the degree to which the job requires to complete all works from the beginning to end with the get desirable outcomes (Hackman &Oldham, 1975).

Task Significance
The task significance is a very important dimension because it creates team tasks meaningful and valuable and thus will motivate them to increase their performance (Zawawi &Nasurdin, 2017). Hackman &Oldham (1980) described the concept of task significance as the degree that the employee has a substantial and tangible impact on others whether inside or outside of the organization. Consequently, the job is considered meaningful and valuable if it is significant to other people (Teryima &Abubakar, 2018). In addition, task significance refers to the degree to which the job has an important impact on other people whether inside or outside of the organization (Abuzaid, 2020). Furthermore, task significance defines the degree of effect the job and its elements or components on the lifestyle of the employees whether directly or indirectly (Ababneh &Hackett, 2019) 2.1.4 Autonomy According to Abuziad (2020); Matilu &K'Obonyo (2018) ; the concept of autonomy is described as a degree that the job that provides essential autonomy or freedom, independence and freedom of action in defining procedures and scheduling work. Job autonomy defined as a degree to which the job provides freedom of action regarding day-to-day work decisions such as timing and manner of doing work (Parker, 2013). Moreover, autonomy can stimulate and empower employees to attempt new ideas and learn from past experiences and expand their skills and knowledge related to their field (Coelho &Augusto, 2010). Therefore, autonomy is a very important element to give the employees more chance to see their job outcomes and thinking out of the box within the organization and then enhance their performance in the future.

Feedback
According to Hackman &Oldham (1980) feedback refers to the degree of getting clear information by employees regarding their job to complete this and improve the performance effectively. It can be defined as the process that employees obtaining clear and direct information regarding the effectiveness of job activities which performing concerning their work (Anjum et al., 2014). Moreover, it can be described as the degree to which the job allows employees to have the chance to obtain feedback on the effectiveness of their job (Na-Nan &Pukkeeree, 2013). Therefore, the feedback is lead to know the knowledge of job outcome (Shani & AnandKumar, 2011). Furthermore, it makes the role very clear and increases the autonomy of the task (Abuziad, 2020).

Organizational Ambidexterity
Organizational ambidexterity refers to the ability to manage exploration and exploitation simultaneously and at the same organization (Palm &Lilja, 2016). It can be defined as the ability to carry out both sort of explorative and exploitative changes (Al-Mansi, 2018). According to Raisch &Birkinshaw (2008) it is described as the constant pursuit of companies to achieve exploitative and exploratory innovation. More specifically, ambidextrous organizations should have enough flexibility to deal and adapt to changes in the environment characterized by the ambiguous and dynamic to attain sustainability (Gibson &Birkinshaw, 2004).On the other side, the main assumption of Organizational ambidexterity that strategic decisions always in contradictions, and the managers impose deals with these trade-offs (Dá vid, 2016).
Additionally, the terminologies of exploration and exploitation have become used widely in the field of organizational analysis of technological innovation and organizational adaptation (Acevedo &Dí az-Molina, 2019). The concept of exploration involves many components such as search, risk-taking, variation, experimentation, flexibility and discovery, while the concepts of exploitation include modification, efficiency, selection, and implementation or carry out (March, 1991:71). Consequently, the exploitation leads to shape or build trust in organizational activities (Yamakawa, Yang &Lin, 2011). Furthermore, exploitation assists the organizations to achieve continuing market growth by overcoming weakness points and inertia (Zhaxylyk, 2020). In addition, exploitation consists of radical innovations to match or satisfy emerging customers or market's needs, while exploitation contains incremental innovations that are close to the existing knowledge that design to match the present customer needs or markets (Benner & Tushman, 2003). Accordingly, large businesses are struggling to constitute their organizational ambidexterity to focus on exploiting the current resources efficiently and explore the opportunities of new business (Lee, 2019).

Job Characteristics and Organizational Ambidexterity
Abazeed (2020) pointed out that there is a relationship between strategic capabilities and organizational ambidexterity in the presence of knowledge management as a mediate variable. On the other side, there is a positive impact of the job characteristics model on work engagement (Abuziad, 2020). Ketabchi (2020) revealed that human resources flexibility is positively connected to organizational ambidexterity. Hussein (2020) noted in his study that there is an important connection between job characteristics and job performance. Moreover, there is an association between ambidexterity and performance in the presence of organizational capital as a moderating variable (Fu, Flood &Morris, 2016).
According to Levinthal & March (1993) organizational performance depends on the ability of organizations to develop their capability via exploit the current competencies and generate new ideas effectively to provide the products and services that foster the competitiveness of the organization in the future. Therefore, organizational ambidexterity is very important to the organizations to keep growing up and survive (junni et al., 2013). According to Cottrell &Nault (2004) mentioned that the organizational ambidexterity should be managed very well because it's strongly related to the organization's survival. In their study, Mom et al., (2018) found that there are important new multilevel visions about the effectiveness of strategic human resource systems in supporting and encouraging individual and organizational ambidexterity. Kettenbohrer, Beimborn &Eckhardt (2015) mentioned that the skill variety is the most important for job characteristic for identifying Business Process Standardization acceptance. Johari &Yahya(2009) reported that job characteristics such as (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback) have an impact on employee task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. Kang &snell (2009) reported that human resource management practices play an important role in building organizational ambidexterity. Senen, Sumiyati &Masharyono (2016) found that the skill variety has an impact on job performance, while the other dimensions of job characteristics don't have an impact on job performance. Besides, job autonomy is considered an important determinate of job satisfaction (Nguyen, Taylor &Bradley, 2003). Therefore, the above discussion leads to formulate the following hypotheses: H 1: There is a positive effect of the Job Characteristics (skills variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback) on organizational ambidexterity. From the main hypothesis, the researcher formulated the subhypotheses as follows:  Figure 1. the study model Source: Prepared by the researcher to cover the current study variables that were obtained from the study of Cao, Gedajlovic, &Zhang, 2009).

Procedure and Strategy
The purpose of this study is to identify the effect of Job Characteristics on organizational ambidexterity. Moreover, Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique were used to test the hypotheses of the current study.

Study Population and Sample
The study population involves Food and beverages companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange (2020) which numbered (8) companies. Besides, the study sample includes (120) employees selected by the Convenience sample method. Whereas the analysis unit includes the managers, their deputies, heads of departments and supervisors.

Measures
The current study relied on a questionnaire to collect the data from the respondents. Besides, the questionnaire involved three parts. The first part includes the demographic information and the second part involves the questions related to Job Characteristics and their dimensions which adopted from  and measured by (15) items. The third part includes the (6) items adopted from (Cao, Gedajlovic, &Zhang, 2009) to cover the organizational ambidexterity. Accordingly, the respondent's answers were based on the five Likert scale ranged from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree.

Descriptive Analysis
The questionnaire was distributed to (120) managers, their deputies, and heads of departments. Questionnaires were gathered from (100) respondents and shaped 83% as a response rate. The table below (1) shows the characteristics of the study sample which divided based on gender, and Experience and job position. While, table (2) shows the results of arithmetic means, standard deviations.   The table above shown the Cronbach Alpha values for the Skills variety was (0.784), and the value of Cronbach Alpha for the task identity was (0.802), while the Cronbach Alpha of Task significance was (0.788), whereas the Cronbach Alpha of Autonomy was (0.773) and the value of Cronbach Alpha of feedback was (0.751), and the value of Cronbach Alpha Organizational ambidexterity was (0.932). Accordingly, the instrument was suitable because the values of Cronbach Alpha were higher than 0.70 (Hair et al, 2010). Furthermore, table number (3) shows that the Composite Reliability values of all variables were more than (0.70), and this indicates that all independent variables are acceptance. As well, the table shows the values of Average Variance Extracted which higher than (0.50) and these values fell within the acceptable limit. Finally, the values of factor loading more than (0.70) which fall within the acceptable values exception item number (13) that will be deleted in the second level of analysis.   Vol. 14, No. 4;2021  The researcher has conducted the multicollinearity, variance inflation factor and tolerance tests among the independent variables before testing the hypotheses to verify of there is no high correlation between the independent variables. The table above (4) shows that the variance inflation factor values less than 10 and range from (1.443) to (1.621) for all independent variables. The tolerance values are higher than 0.05 and range from (0.617) to (0.693). Therefore, the values follow up the normal distribution according to (Sekaran &Bougie, 2013).

Hypotheses Testing
In this section, the researcher tests the hypothesis by using the Partial Least Square (PLS) technique. The following tables show the result of the test the hypotheses as follows: The table above shows the value of R (square) equal (0.508) at a significant level (0.000) , and this explains that Job Characteristics interprets %50.8 of the change in the organizational ambidexterity. Besides, the table above shows the value of T which equal (13.337) at a significant level (α ≤0.05). Moreover, the table shows that the value of β equal (0.713) and this refers that the positive effect of the Job Characteristics model on Organizational ambidexterity. Accordingly, we approved the hypothesis which said: there is a positive effect of Job Characteristics on Organizational ambidexterity. The table above shows the value of R (square) equal (0.210) at a significant level (0.000), and this explains that Job Skills variety interprets %21 of the change in the organizational ambidexterity. Besides, the table above shows the value of T which equal (6.676) at a significant level (α ≤0.05). Moreover, the table shows that the value of β equal (0.485), and this refers that the positive effect of Skills variety on Organizational ambidexterity. Due to this, we accepted the hypothesis which said: there is a positive effect of Skills variety on Organizational ambidexterity. The table above shows the value of R (square) equal (0.383) at a significant level (0.000), and this explains that task identity interprets %38.3 of the change in the organizational ambidexterity. Besides, the table above shows the value of T which equal (11.660) at a significant level (α ≤0.05). Moreover, the table shows that the value of β equal (0.619), and this refers that the positive effect of task identity on Organizational ambidexterity. Due to this, we accepted the hypothesis which said: there is a positive effect of task identity on Organizational ambidexterity.  The table above shows the value of R (square) equal (0.467) at a significant level (0.000), and this explains that autonomy interprets %46.7 of the change in the organizational ambidexterity. Besides, the table above shows the value of T which equal (10.786) at a significant level (α ≤0.05). Moreover, the table shows that the value of β equal (0.683) and this refers that the positive effect of autonomy on Organizational ambidexterity. Therefore, we accepted the hypothesis which said: there is a positive effect of autonomy on Organizational ambidexterity.

Discussion
The results of the current study found that there is a positive effect of the Job Characteristics Model (skills variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback) on organizational ambidexterity. This result is aligned with studies of (Abazeed, 2020;Abuziad, 2020;Ketabchi;. We might be explaining this result by the role of job characteristics on organizational ambidexterity because if the employees have known their task very well, they will perform their task effectively and efficiently which lead to an ambidextrous organization. Besides, the current study showed that there is a positive effect of skills variety on Organizational ambidexterity. This result is consistent with the study of (Hussein, 2020;Senen, Sumiyati &Masharyono, 2016;Kettenbohrer, Beimborn &Eckhardt, 2015). Moreover, this result confirmed that skill variety has an important role in enhancing employee performance and expand their skills and knowledge. Furthermore, the study also showed that there is a positive effect of task identity on Organizational ambidexterity. This result is supported by the studies of (Mom et al., 2018;Johari &Yahya, 2009). Hence, if the employee perceives that their work is meaningful and very clear, they will exert high efforts to perform their works. Additionally, the current study found that there is a positive effect of task significance on Organizational ambidexterity. This result is consistent with the study of (Abazeed, 2020;Abuziad, 2020;Johari &Yahya, 2009). This result explains that task significance is very important especially if the task has an impact on the employee's lives (Anjum et al., 2014). Furthermore, there is a positive effect of autonomy on organizational ambidexterity. This result is aligned with the study of (Nguyen, Taylor &Bradley, 2003). The autonomy will lead to an increase the job satisfaction especially to the employees who have the willingness to achieve and grow up (Herzberg, Mausner &Snyderman, 1959). Finally, the current study showed that there is a positive effect of feedback on organizational ambidexterity. This study is consistent with the study of (Ketabchi, 2020; Mom et al., 2018;Johari &Yahya, 2009). Feedback is very important because the main goal for any business is to stay a long time; therefore, any business needs to have feedback about the outcomes of its work whether positive or negative. Additionally, feedback assists to improve job autonomy by eliminating role ambiguity (Abuziad, 2020).

Recommendations and Future Prospect
The study recommends increasing the job characteristics levels and the organizational ambidexterity levels in the researched companies. Additionally, empowering and involving employees' participation in decision-making processes. Moreover, giving the employees more autonomy to carry out their work and focuses on the diversity of their skills to provide them with new experiences and skills. It also recommends that the tasks assigned to employees should be clear and meaningful. Besides, tasks must be precisely defined very well to reduce conflict among the employees. The tasks should be suitable for employees' qualifications and review periodically. Finally, the study recommends the future researchers complete this study on the other sectors.

Limitations
The current study has some limitations. One of them, the study results may not represent the results for whole companies. The second limitation is COVID-19constrained the researcher to distribute more questionnaires.
Previous studies are few that linked job characteristics and organizational ambidexterity.