Role of ambidexterity and learning capability in firm performance: A study of e-commerce industry in India

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to comprehend the ambidexterity and organizational learning capability construct in the Indian E-commerce industry context.

Design/methodology/approach

The survey method was adopted for this study. A survey was circulated among the personnel working in E-commerce companies in India. The focus was on people working in managerial positions and had at least three years of experience in the same industry.

Findings

This paper investigates the link between two dimensions of ambidexterity, i.e., exploration, exploitation and learning capability in firm performance. The paper also establishes the moderating effect of the learning capability on the two dimensions of ambidexterity and firm’s performance.

Research/limitations/implications

Our focus was to cover most of the E-commerce companies, yet to generalize the research the analysis needs to be conducted with even more E-commerce companies. Although we took extraordinary care to gather data from multiple resources and discarded the data that was incomplete or was from lower level employees yet, we need a larger sample to establish the causal claim of our model.

Practical/implications

We reason that learning capability of a firm impacts the two dimensions and firms should focus both on external and internal knowledge to benefit from the ambidexterity efforts.

Social/implications

Learning capability influences a firm’s performance and has managerial implications. The analysis’ results on the India based ecommerce companies differs from prior research done in more developed countries and other industries.

Originality/value

No prior research has been done from this perspective in the Indian context, and thus our work opens up new avenues for researchers to look at.Keywords Ambidexterity, Firm performance, Learning capability

Citation

Dhir, S. and Dhir, S. (2018), "Role of ambidexterity and learning capability in firm performance: A study of e-commerce industry in India", VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, Vol. 48 No. 4, pp. 517-536. https://doi.org/10.1108/VJIKMS-10-2017-0073