Organizational Ambidexterity Flipped: Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises’ Internal Exploration and External Exploitation to Cope with Resource Constraints

Organizational ambidexterity has been argued to be the critical aspect of a firm’s long-term, superior performance. However, the conventional notion of organizational ambidexterity can hardly be applied directly to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which largely suffer from resource constraints. How do SMEs achieve organizational ambidexterity when available resources are likely to be exhausted in everyday operations only to stay afloat? In this study, the concept of organizational ambidexterity is flipped to be reconceptualized and understood from the perspectives of SMEs. Instead of externally exploring for new opportunities and internally exploiting to achieve efficiency, internal exploration to create new opportunities and external exploitation of contingent opportunities in the environments are proposed for SMEs to achieve organizational ambidexterity under the challenge of constrained resources.