Absorptive Capacity in Knowledge-Intensive Teams: A Review of Current Literature and Future Tasks

Abstract

Companies have been increasingly opting to utilize knowledge-intensive teams to contend with highly turbulent and dynamic conditions as it can promote innovations performance and lead to competitive advantage. Knowledge-intensive teams, just like research teams, product development teams or strategic planning teams, relies on highly qualified individuals to absorb new external knowledge and share it among the whole companies to ensure the ability of solving complex tasks. So, knowledge-intensive teams must access high level of Absorptive Capacity (hereinafter, ACAP), which has been defined as a set of dynamic organizational routines and processes, by which firms acquire, assimilate, transform, and exploit knowledge, to assure they can absorb and exploit new external knowledge. In spite the importance of finding out how to build ACAP for knowledge-intensive teams, little of studies in this field, however, disintegrate the ACAP construct into team level and investigate how to promote ACAP at team level. Since ACAP is regarded as a kind of multilevel capability and it only can be internally built rather than simply bought from outside as its organization-specific nature, we review important prior studies in this field and state that future research should focuses on the combined effects of Gatekeepers and Combinative capabilities on ACAP.