Abstract
The coronavirus pandemic has compounded the challenges of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Apart from the operational challenges that business owners need to sort out for their SMEs, regulatory disruption is a factor in the business environment influencing business operations and sustainability. This chapter examines the place of ambidextrous leadership in sustaining SMEs in the post-pandemic era. A desktop research approach was adopted to analyze the impact of ambidextrous leadership on the innovative performance of SMEs through empirical studies conducted in big conglomerates, as well as SMEs. This chapter found that ambidextrous leadership is positively associated with the innovation of SMEs in the high-tech sector in developed and developing countries. Entrepreneurs may adopt an ambidextrous leadership style to drive the innovative performance of their businesses in the pandemic period. Ambidextrous leadership is fundamental in promoting workforce creativity, continuous business process improvement, and resource-efficiency.
TopBackground
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic emanated from Wuhan, China in late 2019 and was later declared in February 2020 as a global health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) (Okyere, Forson & Essel‐Gaisey, 2020). The widespread of COVID-19 poses a serious threat to the sustainability of business conglomerates, private and public institutions, as well as Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) across the globe. SMEs in different categories and stages of development in both developed and developing countries were adversely affected, based on the need to observe social distancing (Loayza & Pennings, 2020). Social distancing is the practice of maintaining a greater than usual physical distance (such as six feet or more) from other people or of avoiding direct contact with people or objects in public places during the outbreak of a contagious disease to minimise exposure and reduce the transmission of infection (Merriam-Webster, n.d). The need to enforce social distancing orders by many countries led to the total/partial lockdown of many economies across the globe for over a month. The purpose of lockdown was to reduce human-to-human transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, many public places on shutdown were malls, schools, higher education institutions, restaurants, as well as public gatherings such as conferences, marriage ceremonies and many sports events worldwide (Manjunatha, Kumar & Math, 2020). This action by governments posed a serious challenge to the sustainability of SMEs, especially those operating or rendering non-essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic (Fairlie, 2020; Indriastuti & Fuad, 2020). For example, informal markets, cinemas, fitness centres, hotels, restaurants, artisans, among others suffered losses.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Regulatory Disruption: A set of strict conditions or a regulatory framework by the government affecting business operations within a country or in an international business environment.
Creativity: The ability of an entrepreneur to challenge the status quo and encourage the workforce in generating new ideas to meet future business expectations.
Ambidextrous Strategies: The ability of a business to develop and apply multiple approaches or plans towards exploiting current opportunities and exploring future business opportunities simultaneously for innovative performance.
Flexibility: A swift responsiveness to the changes in the external business environment and align business strategies, structure, culture and developing capabilities to meet expectations.
Eco-Innovation: The development of processes, products and services in ensuring human, economic, social and environmental sustainability.
Opening Behaviours: Actions taken by business leaders in promoting independent thinking, knowledge sharing, collective creativity and providing an enabling environment that encourages individual employees as well as teams to challenge the status quo.
Market Orientation: A business philosophy focusing on identifying either current and future customer needs or wants and developing business strategies to those needs.
Closing Behaviours: These are actions taken by business leaders to institutionalise changes and shape desired work behaviour towards the attainment of current organisational objectives.