Binary Organizational Characteristics Antecedents And Performance Outcomes: A Meta-analysis

Organizational development is facing a variety of paradoxes in the fast-changing and rat race business environment. In order to gain a long-lasting success in dynamic complex environment,organizations should emphasis stability and efficiency, increase current revenue through exploitative innovation, at the same time encourage creation and risk, achieve long-term competitive advantage through exploratory innovation. organizational ambidexterity has received wide concern in this context. At present, researches on organizational ambidexterity is becoming rich, however there still exist some shortcomings. Empirical research on the antecedents of ambidexterity are fragmented, lacking of comprehensive and systematic examination; relationship between ambidexterity and performance have not reached consensus, studies cannot draw a universal conclusion due to the different research design; there are various measures about organizational ambidexterity, which may objectively lead to mixed research results. How to build high-level organizational ambidexterity? What is the exactly relationship between ambidexterity and performance? What are the moderating variables that impact on the relationships among organizational characteristics, ambidexterity and performance? All these issues need to be discussed.Based on a total of 151 effect sizes reported in 74 studies, the paper conducts a meta-analysis to discuss the organizational characteristic antecedents and performance consequences of ambidexterity, and deeply explore the reasons of the heterogeneity of empirical results. The results indicate that: (1) Structural, contextual and leadership characteristics of organizations have correlation with ambidexterity, and the contextual and leadership characteristics have stronger effects; (2) Measurements of ambidexterity, level of analysis and industry type moderate the relationship between organizational characteristics and ambidexterity. There shows closer relationship between contextual and leadership characteristics with the ambidexterity by multiplying measure, leadership characteristics have stronger influence on ambidexterity at the level of business units, structural and leadership characteristics have higher degree positive correlation with ambidexterity in high-tech industries; (3) Ambidexterity has positive effects on organizational performance, including financial performance, innovation consequences, customer consequences and employee consequences; (4) The relationship between ambidexterity and performance affected by the measurements of ambidexterity, level of analysis and industry type.The outcomes of organizational ambidexterity are more salient on the context of non-corporate level and high-tech industries. Further, the relationship between ambidexterity and performance was jointly moderated by some measurement and situational factors.The main contributions of this paper are that we conclude existing research using meta-analysis, and explore the internal logic and mechanism of ambidexterity, identified and empirically verified the contingent attributes of the organizational antecedents and performance consequences of ambidexterity. The paper provide new ideas for subsequent related research, as also as provide beneficial management suggestion for enterprise managers.