A trilogy of organizational ambidexterity: Leader’s social intelligence, employee work engagement and environmental changes

•Extends ambidexterity literature.•Leader’s social intelligence has a positive impact on creativity.•Leader’s ambidexterity is penetrating employee behavior.•Environment influences more expoitation than exploration. By proposing an integrative multilevel framework, this paper analyzes the simultaneous impact of two internal micro-antecedents (i.e., leader’s social intelligence and employee’s work engagement) and one external macro-antecedent (i.e., dynamically changing environment) of organizational ambidexterity on two dimensions of organizational performance (i.e., creativity and productivity) through the simultaneous pursuance of organizational exploration and exploitation by firms. The analysis is based on a sample of 657 Greek employees working in 99 private organizations, by adopting a multi-level structural equation modeling via Mplus. The findings reflect that leader’s social intelligence has higher positive impact on creativity through exploration activities, compared to productivity through exploitation activities. Additionally, the dynamically changing environment has a lower positive impact on creativity compared to the positive impact on productivity. This study contributes to the field of ambidexterity and behavioral integration literature by simultaneously examining micro- and macro-antecedents and consequences of organizational ambidexterity.