Abstract: In the process of speeding up the implementation of innovation driven development strategy in China, it has been crucial for enterprises to improve organizational creativity and then promote organizational innovation. Among the various influence factors of organizational creativity and innovation, corporate strategy is an important contextual factor. Market orientation and entrepreneurship orientation are the strategic core of enterprise development in emerging economies. However, the existing research on the relationship between market orientation and organizational creative output is inconsistent and how entrepreneurial orientation influences the effect of market orientation on organizational creativity has not been paid attention to and explored.
In view of this, this study explores how market orientation has an impact on organizational creativity through the ambidextrous organizational culture (i.e., consistent culture and adaptive culture), and how entrepreneurial orientation can alleviate the potential adverse impact of market orientation on organizational creativity, so as to promote the sustainable and efficient development of enterprises.
Based on a sample of 145 sets of effective matching questionnaires, including 395 questionnaires for senior managers and 584 questionnaires for core employees in 145 companies, the results demonstrates that market orientation has an inverted-U shape effect on organizational creativity through two different mediating mechanisms, which are the two dimensions of ambidextrous organizational culture (i.e., consistent culture and adaptive culture). Specifically, the positive mediating effect of consistent culture decreases when market orientation increases from low level to moderate level and eventually becomes negative when market orientation turns to high level, while adaptive culture partially mediates the relationship between market orientation and organizational creativity. Meanwhile, it demonstrates that entrepreneurial orientation moderates the inverted-U shape relationship between market orientation and organizational creativity. When entrepreneurial orientation is high, the positive influence of market orientation on organizational creativity increases along with the increase of market orientation, otherwise, it decreases.
Our understanding of the relationship between market orientation and organizational creativity can be enriched and the extant literature is extended in the following aspects: (1) the internal mechanism between market orientation and organizational creativity is enriched from the perspective of ambidextrous organizational culture. (2) the findings of the different effects of consistent culture and adaptive culture on organizational creativity deepen the cognition that there is threshold effect of organizational culture characteristics on the promotion of organizational creativity. (3) the moderating role of entrepreneurial orientation in the relationship between market orientation and organizational creativity reveals the importance of the synergistic effect of different enterprise strategic orientation. The findings also provide important managerial implications for Chinese enterprises to improve organizational creativity and innovation.

Key words: market orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, organizational creativity, ambidextrous organizational culture