Organisational learning, organisational ambidexterity, environmental turbulence, and NPD performance of Malaysian's manufacturing sector

Despite numerous studies proving that environmental turbulence was moderating the new product development (NPD) performance of manufacturing firms, it is however, still less stressed upon in Malaysia. Motivated by the current NPD issues on organisational capability from the dynamic capability (DCs) perspective, this study aimed to empirically determine the relationships between organisational capability and NPD performance, and sequentially examine the moderating effects of environmental turbulence in those relationships. A survey was randomly conducted among 123 product/production managers from various manufacturing industries in
Malaysia. The data was analysed with the SPSS v.19 statistical technique. Prior to the analysis, the data was cleaned, inspected for outliers, normality, factor analysis,
and reliability test to meet the assumptions for the parametric test. The results of correlation and hierarchical multiple regression analyses found 22 (out of 48) hypotheses were supported. In detail, the exploitation capability, exploration capability, and contextual ambidexterity were found to be significantly correlated to
NPD performance. It was also found that market turbulence was giving a pure moderation to all types of organisational capability (exploitation capability, exploration capability, structural ambidexterity, and contextual ambidexterity) on NPD financial performance. Meanwhile, the moderating effects of technological turbulence, and competitive intensity were varied across different relationships. Allin-all, the findings indicated that the concept of DCs was useful for building a firm’s ability to deploy organisational capabilities under different types of environmental turbulence to achieve better NPD performance. It can be achieved by creating balance in the firm’s NPD portfolio and is useful in the NPD strategy for decisionmaking process. Besides these contributions, the limitations of the study, and future research agenda were also discussed.