Strategic Ambidexterity in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Implementing Exploration and Exploitation in Product and Market Domains

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Voss, Glenn B.; Voss, Zannie Giraud
• 署名单位: Southern Methodist University; Southern Methodist University
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0790
• 发表日期: 2013
• 页码: 1459-1477
• 关键词: ambidexterity; product exploration; product exploitation; market exploration; market exploitation

摘要

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a critical challenge that is particularly difficult for smaller, nascent organizations that lack the resources, capabilities, and experience necessary to successfully implement ambidexterity. To better understand how small and medium-sized enterprises achieve ambidexterity, we develop theoretical arguments that link organizational performance to strategic combinations of exploration and exploitation in both product and market domains We test the hypotheses with a longitudinal study in a dynamic industry that combines objective measures of competition, firm size, age, and revenue performance with self-reported measures of product and market exploration and exploitation. The empirical results offer new insights with respect to several tensions at the heart of the ambidexterity challenge: (1) pure strategies that combine product exploration with market exploration or product exploitation with market exploitation have complementary interaction effects on revenue, (2) cross-functional ambidexterity combining product exploitation with market exploration also exerts complementary interaction effects on revenue, (3) product ambidexterity has positive effects on revenue for older and larger-but not younger and smaller-firms, and (4) market ambidexterity has positive effects on revenue for larger-but not smaller, younger, or older-firms. Two ambidexterity paradoxes emerge: (1) larger, older firms have the resources, capabilities, and experience required to benefit from a product ambidexterity strategy, but larger, older firms are less likely to implement product ambidexterity; and (2) only larger firms have the resources and capabilities required to benefit from a market ambidexterity strategy, but developing and sustaining market ambidexterity is necessary to drive long-term growth.