Team Absorptive Capacity: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Increasingly, organizations collaborate with suppliers, competitors or technology providers to access external knowledge when developing new products. Prior research acknowledges the importance of an organization’s absorptive capacity for its innovation performance – the organization’s ability to acquire new knowledge and information, assimilate, transform and exploit it. As innovations are usually developed by project teams, it is important to bring the organizational level construct absorptive capacity to the team-level. Consequently, we developed a measure for team-level absorptive capacity, investigated potential influencing factors and studied its relation to team performance. We collected data from interorganizational new product development teams and included data from team members, team leads and team-external managers in our analysis. We performed a factor analysis to validate the developed team absorptive capacity construct. Furthermore, analysis of the results demonstrated a significant positive relationship of team absorptive capacity with product innovativeness. Concerning the antecedents of team absorptive capacity, we found a significant positive association with partner work style similarity and an inverted u-shape relationship with the partner’s knowledge. Social category similarity did not show a significant relationship with team absorptive capacity.