INTRODUCTION

To avoid using, old, suboptimal, processes linked with excessive reliance on exploitation and as well as the instability associated with over-reliance on exploration, firms need to strike the right balance between exploration and exploitation (Levinthal and March, 1993). Exploitation involves reducing operational redundancies and leveraging supply chain technology while exploration involves pursuing new supply chain solutions and exploring new opportunities (Kristal et al., 2010). When organizations overly rely on an exploitation strategy, they experience short-run advantages as they can make the best use of existing resources. In the long-run, however, these organizations are likely to fail due to increased competition, obsolete technologies, and overused resources. In contrast, organizations that rely excessively on an exploration strategy can become stuck in a vicious cycle of search, change and failure (Levinthal and March, 1993). Thus, to improve firm performance, firms should emphasize the balance of both exploration and exploitation practices (Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004). Achieving the twin, but apparently conflicting, goals of exploration and exploitation simultaneously within the supply chain is referred to as supply chain ambidexterity (Kristal et al., 2010). Following March’s (1991) seminal piece on organizational ambidexterity, several studies have examined the importance of ambidexterity, its antecedents, and its consequences. Based on our literature review, we found studies that examined the role of organizational ambidexterity on a firm’s ability to maintain competitive advantage (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2011), enhance organizational performance (Boumgarden et al., 2012; Junni et al., 2013), discover new knowledge (Borzillo et al., 2012), promote high performance work practices (Patel et al., 2013) and develop new products (Wei et al., 2014). Other researchers identified antecedents of organizational ambidexterity by studying factors such as alignment of knowledge assets (Lin, et al., 2017), top management diversity (Li, 2013), and strategic orientations in decision-making (Kortmann, 2015). Still, other studies, that are conceptual in nature, use organizational ambidexterity as a framework to study organizational dynamism (Ricciardi et al., 2016), relative ambidexterity (D’Souza et al., 2017) and innovation (Zhang et al., 2017; O’Reilly III and Tushman, 2013; Parikh, 2016; Xu et al., 2013; Smits et al., 2015). Research on supply chain ambidexterity, specifically, is limited; the only paper addressing the issue is by Lee and Rha (2016) who explore the role of supply chain ambidexterity on supply chain resilience.