Research On Modularity Basis Of Organization Ambidexterity

With the advent of economic globalization and Internet era, enterprises are facing a more and more complex and competitive environment which is full of dynamic change. On one hand, enterprises need to take advantages of various utilization-oriented activities in efficient ways to meet the changes in the current market demand and on the other hand, enterprises need to actively carry out exploration-oriented activities to adapt themselves to the development trend of the future market. For such purposes, enterprises need to balance the utilization and exploration activities, establishing the ambidexterity of organization. As an important structure design principle for enterprises to deal with complex problems, "modularity" can effectively reduce the complexity of the system and improve the flexibility of the system and its ability to adapt to the environment, which draws more and more attention from practitioners and theorists. This article takes the structure foundation of organization ambidexterity as breakthrough point to discuss the relations among product modularity, organization modularity and organization ambidexterity; and based on predecessors’ researches, it establishes related models and verifies and corrects this model by means of case study and questionnaires.With regard to the case study, we look into the development of Huawei over the past 30 years and divide it into five stages which are startup stage, growing stage, mature stage, revolution stage and new stage, and describe and analyze the products, organization structures and innovation situations of these five stages, exploring and discussing the development path and inner logic of Huawei modularity and ambidexterity. In the process of organization structure development of Huawei, there are three main lines:1. Huawei’s organizational modularity has always been growing; 2. There is a high degree of correspondence between organization modularity and product modularity; 3. Organization modularity first grows from inner structure and then extends to external structures. While in the process of Huawei’s organization ambidexterity, there are also three main lines:1. From utilization-oriented innovation to exploration-oriented innovation, and from the innovation of product component level to the innovation of product architecture level; 2. from the realization of isolation to the realization of isolation-based cooperation; 3 From internal to external. According to the case study of Huawei, we preliminary depict the relations among product modularity, organization modularity and organization ambidexterity, and verify the proposed theoretical model.In terms of the questionnaire research, after questionnaire design, data collection and data analysis, we verify the theoretical model and the results show that:1. Product modularity has a significant positive influence on organizational modularity; 2. Organization modularity has a significant positive influence on the binding effect of organization ambidexterity and a significantly negative effect on the balance effect of ambidexterity; 3. Organization modularity has a partially mediating effect on the relation (binding effect) between product modularity and organization ambidexterity; 4. Environmental dynamism has a partially regulating effect on the relation between product modularity and organization modularity; 5. Slack resources have a partially regulating effect on the relation between product modularity and organization modularity.