Ambidexterity in Context of Micro and Small Firms

Micro and small firms operating in a volatile business environment are coerced to manage their limited resources for survival in the short term and sustaining competitiveness in the long term, which is achieved through concurrent pursuit of exploitation and exploration activities, namely through ambidexterity. Indeed, resource and competency constraints create both pressure and challenge for micro and small firms to pursue exploitation and exploration simultaneously, which makes this issue (ambidexterity) more essential to those firms. Thus, this chapter, examining the ambidexterity in context of micro and small firms, is expected to contribute to literature by providing an insight on how micro and small firms would survive and sustain in a highly volatile business environment through their ambidextrousness. In this respect, after “ambidexterity” is explicated, the essentiality of ambidexterity for micro and small firms operating in volatile business environment will be discussed, and an ambidextrous organization model for micro and small firms to achieve better performance will be proposed.