Abstract:Balancing exploration and exploitation and being an ambidextrous organization has been a crucial strategic decision for many firms.However,there's mixed conclusion of relationship between organizational ambidexterity and firm performance in current literature.This paper tries to resolve the paradox of organizational ambidexterity and firm performance by two means.First,this paper distinguishes organizational ambidexterity into high-level balance or low-level balance and the result shows that firms with high-level balance ambidextrous firms exceed those low-level balance ambidextrous firms.Second,based on the niche width decision from ecological population theory,this paper introduces environmental turbulence to explore its effect on the relationship between organizational ambidexterity and firm performance,the result shows environmental turbulence negatively moderates the relationship between ambidexterity and firm performance.In conclusion,low-level balance brings no better performance,especially in highly dynamic environment,specialists (focused on exploration or exploitation) bring better performance than generalists (balancing exploration and exploitation).The conclusions provide meaningful reference for firms making strategic decision in business ecosystem competition.