Strategic conformity, organizational learning ambidexterity, and corporate innovation performance: An inverted U-shaped curve?

The mixed outcomes reported for strategic conformity confirm that there is not yet a unified understanding of how strategic conformity affects firm outcomes. By integrating the institutional and optimal conformity literature, this study investigates how and when strategic conformity impacts corporate innovative performance. Based on a survey of 291 manufacturing firms in China, the empirical results show that strategic conformity has an inverted U-shaped effect on innovative performance and that relative exploitative dimension of ambidexterity mediates the inverted U-shaped association between strategic conformity and innovative performance. Further, we find that higher levels of structural formalization strengthen the relationship between strategic conformity and the relative exploitative dimension of ambidexterity. Both theoretical and empirical contributions of the study are discussed.