Abstract
Ambidextrous firms are those that can simultaneously manage exploitative and explorative innovation, which is why ambidexterity is key for firms that desire to pursue strategic entrepreneurship. Researchers have explored many of the reasons why some firms are more ambidextrous than others. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding how attributes of top decision makers can influence their firms' ambidexterity. By drawing on upper echelons theory and goal orientations research, we explain how firms' ambidexterity can be affected by top decision makers' motivations in achievement situations (i.e., goal orientations). Testing our hypotheses on a sample of 274 top decision makers of firms in the United States, we find that top decision makers' learning goal orientation – their desire to take risks and maximize learning–has an inverted U-shaped relationship with ambidexterity while top decision makers' performance prove goal orientation – their desire to demonstrate competence with existing skills – has a U-shaped relationship with ambidexterity. These effects are weaker for top decision makers who have greater role experience.
Highlights
There has been increasing scholarly interest regarding firms’ efforts to capture value from existing competencies while continuing to explore for new markets and means of creating value (Simsek et al, 2017; Withers et al, 2018)
We contend that top decision makers’ abilities and cognitive processes can improve with higher role experience (e.g., GrafVlachy et al, 2020), and we argue that greater role experience will flatten both the relationship between learning goal orientation and firm ambidexterity, and performance goal orientation and firm ambidexterity
Hypothesis 1 predicted that an inverted U-shaped relationship would exist between top decision makers’ learning goal orientation and their firms’ ambidexterity
Summary
There has been increasing scholarly interest regarding firms’ efforts to capture value from existing competencies while continuing to explore for new markets and means of creating value (Simsek et al, 2017; Withers et al, 2018). These efforts, which constitute strategic entrepreneurship, enable firms to simultaneously deepen their current competitive advantage (exploitation) while seeking opportunities to introduce innovative products and services to new groups of customers (exploration) (Hitt et al, 2001; Ireland et al, 2003).
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