Relying on the upper-echelons perspective, this paper investigates the effect of financial managers’ characteristics on the level of organizational ambidexterity reached in German Mittelstand firms. These firms are often depicted as highly innovative and able to compete on worldwide markets despite significant resource constraints. We theorize that skilled financial managers are very important in making the optimal use of Mittelstand firms’ scarce resources and, in particular, for balancing exploitation and exploration, thus reaching high levels of ambidexterity. Our findings from a survey of German Mittelstand firms broadly confirm our expectations and show that financial managers’ individual entrepreneurial behavior correlates positively with the firms’ level of organizational ambidexterity. In addition, we find that firms with financial managers having enjoyed business education are more likely to reach high levels of ambidexterity if these financial managers are heavily involved in strategy development. Overall, these results indicate that well-suited financial managers are an important human resource for Mittelstand firms. In addition, our findings are among the first to show that financial managers not only influence finance and accounting choices, but also innovation-related outcomes such as organizational ambidexterity.

本文依靠高层视角，调查了财务经理的特征对德国中小型企业达到的组织二元性水平的影响。这些公司通常被描述为具有高度创新性，并且能够在资源有限的情况下在全球市场上竞争。我们认为，熟练的财务经理对于优化利用中小型企业的稀缺资源非常重要，特别是对于平衡开发和探索，从而达到高水平的二元性。我们对德国中小型企业的调查结果广泛证实了我们的预期，并表明财务经理的个人创业行为与企业的组织二元性水平正相关。此外，我们发现，如果财务经理大量参与战略制定，财务经理受过商业教育的公司更有可能达到高水平的二元性。总体而言，这些结果表明，非常适合的财务经理是中小型企业的重要人力资源。此外，我们的研究结果首次表明财务经理不仅影响财务和会计选择，而且影响与创新相关的结果，例如组织的二元性。