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Adaptive marketing capability and product innovations: the role of market ambidexterity and transformational leadership (evidence from Pakistani manufacturing industry)

Shabahat Ali (School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China)
Weiwei Wu (School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China)
Sadaqat Ali (Institute of Management Sciences, University of Science and Tecnology, Bannu, Pakistan)

European Journal of Innovation Management

ISSN: 1460-1060

Article publication date: 23 March 2021

Issue publication date: 23 June 2022

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Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to offer and validate an integrated marketing capability-product innovations framework. Particularly, it aims to examine the role of adaptive marketing capability in enabling market ambidexterity and incremental as well as radical product innovation. Also it intends to investigate the moderating role of transformational leadership between adaptive marketing capability and market ambidexterity.

Design/methodology/approach

Manufacturing firms in Pakistan, an emerging economy, are taken as the context for this study. A designed survey questionnaire is used for data collection. Partial least square technique is employed to empirically validate and test the hypothesized model with a sample of 192 manufacturing firms. Particularly, the two-stage approach in SmartPLS is used to validate measurement models, and structural equation modeling technique is used to test the proposed hypothesis.

Findings

The findings not only confirm that adaptive marketing capability is instrumental to both incremental and radical product innovations but also reveal that adaptive marketing capability serves an important antecedent to market ambidexterity shedding new lights on its mediating role in the relationship of adaptive marketing capability with incremental and radical product innovations. Moreover, the results find that the effectiveness of adaptive marketing capability to support market ambidexterity may involve a possible trade-off between exploitation and exploration when the leaders exhibit a low or high level of transformational leadership behavior.

Originality/value

This study contributes to outside-in strategic perspective and contextual ambidexterity literature by revealing the role of adaptive marketing capability as an important enabler of market ambidexterity which, in turn, allows the firm to simultaneously introduce incremental and radical product innovations. In this way, this study advances the current understanding of the antecedents and consequences of contextual ambidexterity. Also, this study provides insight into the types of capabilities needed for the firm's contextual and employees' behavioral adaptation to simultaneously manage exploitation and exploration within the same business unit which was lacking in the previous literature. Further, this study also offers a novel understanding of the conditional role of transformational leadership between adaptive marketing capability and market ambidexterity.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72072047), Heilongjiang Philosophy and Social Science Research Project (19GLB087), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HIT.NSRIF.2019033) and the Humanities and Social Sciences Project of Ministry of Education in China(20YJC630090). The authors would also like to express their thanks to Editor, Dr Carlo Giglio, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Citation

Ali, S., Wu, W. and Ali, S. (2022), "Adaptive marketing capability and product innovations: the role of market ambidexterity and transformational leadership (evidence from Pakistani manufacturing industry)", European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 1056-1091. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJIM-12-2020-0520

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

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