While extant literature conceptually recognizes individuals as an integral part of the process with which organizations absorb new knowledge, past research has paid limited attention to the antecedents of individual-level absorptive capacity. In this paper, we address this research gap. We build on the interactionist perspective and propose that individual-level absorptive capacity is shaped by the joint effects of individual employees’ dispositions (i.e., need for cognition and proactive personality) and their work context (i.e., time pressure and autonomy). Significantly, we also recognize the multidimensional nature of absorptive capacity, which suggests that individuals need different capabilities to learn and utilize new knowledge in their organizations. We test our predictions using a unique dataset from 646 employees working on knowledge-intensive tasks. Our results show that the joint effects of dispositional and contextual antecedents are not uniform across different dimensions of individual-level absorptive capacity.

中文翻译：

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个人层面的吸收能力：揭示性格和工作环境之间的相互作用

虽然现有文献在概念上承认个人是组织吸收新知识过程中不可或缺的一部分，但过去的研究对个人吸收能力的前因的关注有限。在本文中，我们解决了这一研究空白。我们以互动主义的观点为基础，提出个人层面的吸收能力是由员工个体的性格（即认知需求和积极主动的个性）和工作环境（即时间压力和自主性）的共同影响决定的。值得注意的是，我们还认识到吸收能力的多维性质，这表明个人需要不同的能力来学习和利用组织中的新知识。我们使用 646 名从事知识密集型任务的员工的独特数据集来测试我们的预测。我们的结果表明，性格和背景因素的联合效应在个人吸收能力的不同维度上并不统一。