Abstract
CEOs are known to drive MNE strategies including expansion and ambidexterity and ultimately performance outcomes. Research has studied various elements of the relationships between CEO attributes of education and work experience, firms’ ambidexterity orientation and performance. Nevertheless, our understanding of these links and mechanisms remains incomplete with many missing pieces in the jigsaw, and increasingly scholars have called for studies that take a more encompassing view of these phenomena. In this paper we use a configurational method to study the effects of CEOs’ paradoxical attributes relating to education and experience on ambidexterity orientation, as well as the combined effects of both of these and other contextual factors on performance outcomes of high growth MNEs. Our findings suggest that paradoxical CEO attributes have the potential to significantly impact ambidexterity orientation and, to an even greater extent, performance outcomes, sometimes in counter-intuitive ways. Our study introduces the concept of ‘paradoxical strategic leadership’ and in doing so offers fresh insights as well as additional nuance on established perspectives and ongoing debates in strategic leadership such as impact of stability of CEO tenure, and generalist vs specialist CEOs, on firm outcomes.