Organizations can only be competitive if they are prepared to meet current and future demands. Thus, they have to be efficient concerning time and budged constraints and innovative concerning new products and services at the same time. Likewise, the behavior of all employees in small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) should be geared to both efficiency and innovation. Fostering efficiency- and innovation-oriented behavior of all employees in turn requires efficiency- and innovation-oriented management styles. These management styles are not only different, but stand in opposition to each other. The efficiency-oriented management style implies, for example, directive leadership. The innovation-oriented management-style, by contrast, presumes delegate leadership. Ambidexterity refers to the degree to which an organization does not only deploy one or the other, but both management styles at the same time. Studies by Gibson and Birkinshaw (2004) and Lubatkin et al. (2006) in business units and SMEs show that, firstly, it is possible to combine the two management styles in practice; secondly, the extent to which both of these styles are simultaneously practiced to a high degree is positively related to a company’s economic success; and, thirdly, most organizations do not combine these two styles in the recommended way.
In this paper, we first outline the particularities of the ambidexterity conception and the chances to realize this conception in practice. We then address the question why most SMEs do not practice high degrees of both management styles at the same time vis-à-vis all employees (i.e., deploy ambidexterity) despite the fact that such a combination appears to be both possible and useful. We specify managers' cognitive barriers (Lewis, 2000) that prevent such a combination and describe ways in which these barriers may be overcome.
