CEO family-to-work enrichment, attention to innovation, and organizational ambidexterity

How do chief executive officers’ (CEOs) experiences outside the work domain affect organizational ambidexterity? We examine the mechanisms through which CEO family-to-work enrichment (FWE) influences organizational ambidexterity. Building on the enrichment perspective of the family-work literature and the attention-based view, we argue that FWE broadens and deepens CEOs’ attention to innovation. This enables them to engage in distant and persistent knowledge and information searching, which helps them to pursue high levels of exploitative and exploratory innovation simultaneously. With a two-round sample of 136 CEOs from China, we find strong empirical support for our hypotheses and provide several theoretical and managerial implications.