Strategic ambidexterity in small and medium enterprises: : Implementing exploration in product and market domains

• Autores: Glenn B. Voss, Zannie Giraud Voss
• Localización: Organization Science, ISSN-e 1526-5455, Vol. 24, Nº. 5, 2013, págs. 1459-1477
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • 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.