Employees’ ability to explore and exploit is a micro-foundational component of organizational ambidexterity and hugely influential for organizational performance outcomes. However, little research has directly examined the relationship between exploration and exploitation with a performance at the individual-level. Building on the hierarchical dynamic capability perspective of ambidexterity, we investigate how employee exploration and exploitation affect task performance. We argue that employees’ ability to explore enhances task performance through employee exploitation. Furthermore, drawing on the strategic fit perspective, we examine how this employee exploration-exploitation-task performance relationship varies across different levels of organizational competitive orientation. Using a sample of 278 employees from three IT companies in China, our findings demonstrate that both employee exploration and exploitation have a positive effect on task performance, and employee exploitation acts as an effective mechanism which partially explains the relationship between employee exploration and task performance. Notably, we also find that the path relationship of employee exploration-exploitation-task performance is stronger when competitive orientation is low rather than high. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.

Purpose: The connection between employees’ well-being and performance, although widely studied in organizational psychology, has received much less attention from HRM scholars. The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature by examining the impacts of the multidimensional structure of well-being consisting of psychological, social and health dimensions on employees’ task and contextual performance.Design/methodology/approach: The authors collected data from 281 employees from the New Zealand service sector using a questionnaire survey. Factor analysis was used to determine items that form various facets of well-being and performance constructs. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to test the well-being – performance relationship.Findings: The findings show that different facets of well-being differentially contribute to employees’ task and contextual performance. Specifically, the facets of happiness and trust were positively associated with both task and contextual performance, while the effects of life satisfaction and work life balance on task and contextual performance were insignificant. Moreover, work intensification was only associated with task performance, in contrast, job satisfaction and over commitment were only related to contextual performance.Practical implications: The implications of these findings are two-fold. For researchers, a review and overhaul of the conceptualization and operationalization of well-being in HRM studies is long overdue. For managers, improvements to employees’ job performance and the organization’s health can result from simultaneously enhancing multiple dimensions of employees’ well-being.Originality/value: This study provides new insights into the complex relationship between well-being and performance by incorporating a multidimensional and multifaceted perspective of well-being and highlighting the distinctive effects of various facets of well-being on different types of employees’ performance.

Although essential to all institutions, organizational change is a complex and high risk activity. In this paper, we examine how organizations develop and implement capabilities to facilitate organizational change. Drawing on the dynamic capability perspective and a ‘resourcing’ synergy view, we investigate how realized absorptive capacity in terms of transformation and exploitation capability directly affects organizational change, and how process innovation practices act as an effective mechanism that link transformation and exploitation capability with organizational change. To distinguish our analysis, we focus on both an emerging organizational form and an emerging economy context. Specifically, on the basis of a questionnaire survey of 316 academics from entrepreneurial universities in Malaysia, we find that both transformation and exploitation capability are facilitators of organizational change. However, the relationship of transformation capability with organizational change is fully mediated by process innovation practices, while the relationship between exploitation capability and organizational change is partially mediated by process innovation practices. Our research therefore contributes to the dynamic capability perspective of organizational change and absorptive capacity by highlighting the importance of integrating organizational transformation and exploitation capability with process innovation practices in different ways to facilitate organizational change. Our findings and accompanying discussion on how process innovation practices can generate moves towards universities that are more entrepreneurial will also be of interest to university managers and policy makers.

Buoyed by recent calls for research to explore micro-level cognitive explanations for ambidexterity, this study examines how individuals’ self-efficacy and resilience affect individual ambidexterity across different institutional environments. Building on social cognitive theory, we posit that self-efficacy enhances ambidexterity via resilience and that such relationship varies across economic institutional environments. Our symmetric (PLS-SEM) and configurational (fsQCA) analyses of 1907 knowledge workers in China, New Zealand and Australia provide supportive and complementary evidence for these theoretical arguments. Specifically, PLS-SEM reveals that the mediating effects of resilience on the relationship between self-efficacy and individual ambidexterity are stronger in an environment where economic institutions are weak. fsQCA complements PLS-SEM by showing that individual ambidexterity can be explained by multiple configurations of psychological self-efficacy, resilience, characteristics related to institutions, and personal demographic factors. Taken together, these findings contribute to the international business literature by providing a nuanced understanding of how different psychological resources integrate and interact with institutional factors to enhance individual ambidexterity.