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Introduction
Market forces are incessantly changing. To escape the selective force of the market, organizations must be proactively responsive to the environmental dynamism. They must proactively adjust their internal systems such as technical, political and cultural systems in the direction of environmental changes. Technical system in an organization, for instance, should deviate from its routines when technological forces in its industry have changed. In other words, change forces inside the organization need to be activated to increase its market responsiveness, which alludes to competency of an organization that enables it to respond swiftly to changing market demands (Garrett et al. , 2009).
Research on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has investigated the positive outcomes of the strategic orientation (Morgan et al. , 2016), including its nature to empower employees to immerse themselves in their proactive actions (Lechner and Gudmundsson, 2014) in response to market forces. Supporting innovation in organizations (Ndubisi, 2014), entrepreneurial force drives employees to not only proactively innovate systems in an organization but also take risks and experiment new solutions ahead of its competitors, thereby leveraging its market responsiveness. Entrepreneurship research has tended to suggest that managerial practitioners shape their leadership style into transformational leadership to activate entrepreneurial force in the organization (Ling et al. , 2008; Engelen et al. , 2014). Nonetheless, such a leadership cultivates exploratory force only. Ambidextrous leadership, defined as the interaction and synergy between two complementary leadership behaviors, namely, opening and closing, can cultivate both exploratory and exploitative forces (Rosing et al. , 2011). The ambidexterity in this leadership style engenders the emotional balancing of continuity and change (Huy, 2002), thereby reducing employees' fear of uncertainty and amplifying their self-efficacy to engage in innovative and risk-taking actions. Besides, ambidextrous leaders use opening leadership behavior to encourage employees to proactively search for novel ideas and solutions, and then switch to closing leadership behavior to encourage employees to implement them. Therefore, through opening and closing behaviors, ambidextrous leaders build entrepreneurial values among employees.
As the relationship between EO and market responsiveness has not been investigated, prior research has just focused on moderators for the relationship between EO and organizational performance, such as the dynamism and hostility of the environment (Moreno and Casillas, 2008) or network capability (Walter et al. , 2006)....