Structural Antecedents Of Organization Ambidexterity And Their Effects On Firm Performance

In the context of "super competitive" globle business environment, survival and development of enterprises are necessary to meet the short-term market demand efficiently, and to adapt to long-term market trends innovatively, which requires organization ambidexterity. Organization ambidexterity refers to that an organization can not only efficiently engage in these exploitation activities, such as mobilization and application of existing opportunities, resources and abilities, incremental innovation, etc; but also can actively engage in a variety of exploration activities, such as learning and development of new opportunities, resources and abilities, radical innovation, etc. How to balance and combine exploitative and exploratory activities so as to achieve organization ambidexterity to win a sustainable competitive advantage, become a widespread concern. Based on this, this paper select a structural perspective, regarding organizational structure differentiation and corporate governance structure through organization ambidexterity to affect organizational performance as the main research analysis line, and then develop a series of interrelated study from theory exploration to empirical test.This paper proposed a theoretical framework that organization ambidexterity has two kinds of structural antecedents, which are organizational structure differentiation and corporate governance structure. Organizational structure differentiation separates exploitative unit and exploratory unit to make them focus on exploitative and exploratory tasks respectively, and then affect organization ambidexterity; Corporate governance structure will influence management behavior through monitoring and incentive alignment mechanism which can reduce the agency cost, and then affect organization ambidexterity. While organization ambidexterity has a positive effect on performance, so this paper proposed hypothises that organizational structure differentiation and corporate governance structure will affect corporate performance through organization ambidexterity. Study1was a case study. Based on the existing theoretical framework, this paper divided organization ambidexterity into four dimensions through product and market perspective. Wanma cable’s case has depicted product exploration, product exploitation, market exploration and market exploitation in real company, and then analyzes the interaction between the four dimensions. If companies want to realize sustainable development, they must carry on the portfolio management for existing products and market and new products and market.Study2was an experimental study. Using a self-developed dual experiment task, this study divided different types of subjects into several groups to simulate different levels of organizational structure differentiation, and then these groups conducted experiments to examine the impact of organizational structure differentitaon on exploration, exploitation and their combined effect. The experimental results support the significant effect of organizational structure differentiation on exploration and their combination effect, and proved that organizational structure differentiation is the first structural antecedents of organization ambidexterity. At the same time, the experiment compared the single subject’s operation and double subjects’cooperation, therefore proved that structural perspective is an easier way to achieve organization ambidexterity.Study3was a second-hand panel data study. Aiming at the neglectence of corporate governance structure in the existing research of organization ambidexterity, this paper conducted governance structure to be the second structural antecedent, regarding exploration and exploitation’s balancing effect and combined effect as the intermediary, examine the mechanism of corporate governance promoting short-term and long-term performance through exploration and exploitation’s balancing effect and combined effect. This paper collected listing corporations’panel data of China and the United States from year2006to year2011, using feasible generalized least squares method, the empirical results show that corporate governance is indeed the second structural antecedent of organization ambidexterity. Study4was another second-hand panel data study to integerate the framework of two structural antecedents of organization ambidexterity proposed in this paper. Based on the panel data of Study3, this study added organizational structure differentiation, and the results showed, besides the influence of organizational structure differentiation, corporate governance still significantly affected organization ambidexterity. Organizational structure differentiation and corporate governance structure both have significant effect on organization ambidexterity, and they constitute structural antecedent of organization ambidexterity. Organizational structure differentiation and corporate governance structure can both affect company performance through the balancing effect of exploration and exploitation.