Nesting Ambidexterity Strategies to Buffer Institutional Voids: The Case of Colombian EMNEs

International business faces many external challenges in countries with an absence or underdevelopment of institutions that enable and support market activity. Direct impacts such as employees’ threats to physical security result in fear and concern for personal safety, which may impact employees’ engagement at work. Ambidexterity – the ability to ‘simultaneously fulfil two disparate or conflicting goals that are critical to firm's long-range success’. Traditional ambidexterity researchers propose contextual ambidexterity as the ‘behavioural capacity to simultaneously demonstrate alignment and adaptability across an entire business unit’. The initial fieldwork, which began in 2014, was to collect data from public sources – such as emerging multinational enterprises (EMNEs’) webpages and news reports – on the direct and indirect impacts of armed conflict on firms and employees, and on EMNEs’ strategies to mitigate such impacts. The interviews were held in August–September 2014, October–December 2015, October 2