What Drives Bricolage? The Effects of Learning Orientation, Resource Constraints and Environmental Turbulence

ABSTRACT Recognizing the growing interest in bricolage as an organizational capability that helps overcome resource constraints, this study adopts a resource management perspective to explore the relationship between learning orientation and bricolage, focusing on the moderating effects of resource constraints and environmental turbulence. It first reviews literature related to learning, bricolage and environmental turbulence to develop hypotheses, then tests these hypotheses by analysing responses from a sample of 229 small and medium‐sized enterprises in South Korea. Identifying learning orientation as a driver of bricolage, the empirical analysis reveals that resource constraints and market turbulence significantly moderate the relationship between learning orientation and bricolage. These findings contribute to scholarly understanding of the role of organizational learning orientation as an antecedent of bricolage when accounting for internal and external environments. They also advance bricolage‐related theory by taking the view that firms' perceptions of their own resource poverty levels may vary.