Organizational Ambidexterity and Environmental Catastrophes: Lessons from the Covid-19 Experience

How organizations respond to environmental catastrophes has drawn significant attention among management scholars. Investigations have focused on either the short- or long-term organizational actions and outcomes related to such events. However, the short- and long-term organizational actions occur concurrently, and this concurrency has not been adequately addressed in the literature. The environmental effects induced by the Covid-19 pandemic may offer opportunities to refine our understanding of how organizations manage the long and short-term effects of catastrophic events concurrently. Drawing on published Covid-19 experiences, we use the ambidexterity lens to frame how organizations address short and long-term effects of catastrophic events concurrently, and we offer a generalized model to reflect the underlying relationships. Next, recognizing that organizations act within their referent group, we explore how the relative ambidexterity construct can be used to explore the competitive actions of individual organizations.