In order to survive and develop in the fierce global competition,firms are supposed to be both efficiently responding to the demands of the short-term market and innovatively adapting to the long-term market,which requires organizational ambidexterity .The″structure″within the existing researches on the impact on organizational ambidexterity refers to the organizational structure rather than the governance structure .There are mainly two conflicting ways towards the understanding of the relationship between exploration and exploitation,i .e .,trade-off or orthogonality,and until now researchers have not arrived at any consensus .Since previous studies on organizational ambidexterity have ignored the importance of corporate governance and the ambiguity of the relationship between exploration and exploitation,this study tries to explore the relationship between governance structure and corporate performance from the perspective of the effect of the trade-off and orthogonal relationship between exploration and exploitation,thus revealing the mechanism of corporate governance impact on both short-and long-term performances through the balancing effect and combined effect of exploration and exploitation . In this paper,the panel data of US and China listed companies cover the years 2006 2011 . The FLGS is adopted to avoid the bias of autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity .The following findings indicate that in the US samples,both monitoring and incentive alignment of corporate governance have positive effects on the balancing effect of exploration and exploitation while in the Chinese samples,incentive alignment has positive effects on the balancing effect of exploration and exploitation but monitoring a negative impact,that is,the higher the monitoring,the less balance between exploration and exploitation .This may be due to the relatively low level of exploratory behavior in China,which is difficult to increase at present .As a result,with the high level of monitoring,the agent has to increase exploitation to cope with the increased use of strict monitoring without much improvement of the exploration level,thus leading to the larger gap between them .Neither monitoring nor incentive alignment has an evident effect on the combined effect in both American and Chinese samples,which demonstrates that the combined effect is far more difficult to achieve than the balancing effect .In the American samples,the balancing effect and the combined effect of exploration and exploitation positively influence both long-term and short-term performances,while in the Chinese samples,it is only the balancing effect that plays a positive role in both long-and short-term performances but the combined effect is evident only on short-term rather than on long-term performance,which seems to show that the balancing effect instead of the combined effect is suitable for China at present .The mediation role of the balancing effect between corporate governance and the long-and short-term performances has been partially proved,but the mediation role of combined effects has not been found .This study is an extension of the existing research about organizational ambidexterity,and provides a comparison of corporate behavior differences between US and China listed companies . Owing to the limited data availability,one shortage of this paper is that there is only one variable to represent incentive alignment .Future research may use more variables to test the hypothesis .