Linking organizational ambidexterity and performance: The drivers of sustainability in high-tech firms

Abstract

To strengthen national competitiveness and sustainability, the high-tech industry has been developed as the center of gravity of industrial development in each country, covering the development of new products and the expansion to new customers and markets. Although both aspects are indispensable to high-tech firms' growth momentum and competitive advantages, it is difficult to develop them at the same time. In recent years, scholars have been paying an increasing amount of attention to the significance of organizational ambidexterity in different management fields. Importantly, transformed high-tech firms are obliged to manage the tensions and conflicts that arise from the exploration of new knowledge and the exploitation of existing knowledge to find an appropriate balance between the two to yield synergistic effects. In this study, an original method was used to measure differences in the degree of ambidexterity. The method establishes a multiplicative term of exploration and exploitation to represent the degree of effect of ambidexterity. The higher the exploration and exploitation are, the higher the degree of ambidexterity will be. This study takes as its objects electronics manufacturing firms in Taiwan that engage in the development of new high-tech products. We issued a total of 1000 questionnaires to electronics manufacturing firms in Taiwan and received 228 valid ones. The results indicate that exploitation has a positive effect on performance, and there is an inverse U-shaped correlation between exploration/exploitation and performance. Ambidexterity and its interaction with the market orientation were found to have a positive influence on organizational performance. We also investigated the extent to which an organization places emphasis on resources and the influence of resource allocation on organizational performance. We suggest that the co-existence of exploration and exploitation is important to organizational performance. Accordingly, developing the two capabilities at the same time conforms to the concept of ambidexterity.