External information seeking and organizational ambidexterity in SMEs: Does empowerment climate matter?

Abstract

Access to external information is considered crucial to achieving organizational ambidexterity (OA) while presenting specific challenges for SMEs due to their limited resources. However, little is known about how SMEs can best benefit from their external information-seeking activities for OA purposes, given specific organizational practices. Our paper addresses this research gap by analyzing the effects of external information seeking (i.e., environmental scanning and external managerial networking) on OA while considering the moderating role of empowerment climate in SMEs. Based on a survey administered to CEOs of 1439 French manufacturing SMEs, our main results indicate that empowerment climate positively moderates the effect of scanning breadth on OA but negatively moderates the effect of networking depth. This suggests that SMEs should emphasize external information-seeking activities that are appropriate to their level of empowerment climate so that the positive effects on OA can be fully realized.