A Review of Organizational Ambidexterity and Performance

The success, growth and long-term survival of an organization depend on its ability to exploit current capabilities and simultaneously explore the new competencies. Numerous articles have been devoted to the study of organizational ambidexterity in innovation, organizational and strategic management literature. Some indicated the important role of ambidexterity in organizations' performance. Others brought up that it is not so significant, and this question is yet to be answered. So far, several literature reviews and meta-analysis have been conducted on this construct, which has been focused on limited specific aspects. But to the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive review of both qualitative and quantitative studies which include all types of performance and also highlight the different conceptualization of organizational ambidexterity. Therefore, this comprehensive systematic review of 134 qualitative and quantitative studies during 1991-2016 has pursued two major goals: First identifying different conceptualizations of exploration and exploitation, and second, identifying the causes of different effects of organizational ambidexterity on performance in previous studies. The review results found 15 different conceptualizations of exploration–exploitation; and also six reasons for the different results of previous research on the impact of organizational ambidexterity on performance have been identified, including measurement of organizational ambidexterity, level of analysis, research design, implementing organizational ambidexterity, performance measurement, and organizational ambidexterity conceptualization, each with its own dimensions