While individual ambidexterity has been identified as an essential innovative behavior for organization management, this paper explores the process of empowering middle managers to boost their ability of balancing exploration and exploitation (ambidexterity) and improve their performance. We introduce and complete an empowerment theory that explains how structural and psychological paths of dynamic power-receiving process affect individual ambidexterity and therefore benefit their performance, and how this effect is moderated by psychological factors and team-level knowledge sharing. We test our theory with data from 218 middle managers in 22 firms. The findings show that both structural and psychological empowerment strengthen the link between structural empowerment and ambidexterity, while transactive memory systems enhance the impact of psychological but not structural empowerment on ambidexterity. Originating from power dynamics, our study advances the empowerment theory by identifying the mechanisms and contingencies of empowerment on performance. It also enriches the literature on individual ambidexterity by examining its antecedents, outcomes, and moderators at the middle management level.
