مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله تحقیقات بازاریابی – Journal of Business Research

Research investigating the role that individuals within organizations play in affecting organizational outcomes, which are generally referred to as “micro-foundations” has increased in recent years (Lewin, Massini, & Peeters, 2011). Scholars have argued that in order to understand organizational concepts such as learning and knowledge, we must develop a better understanding of the role individuals play in these processes (Felin & Foss, 2005). However, although absorptive capacity (AC) is intricately related with both organizational learning and knowledge, AC researchers have focused less on individuals’ contributions to its development, focusing instead on structural and procedural antecedents (for exceptions, see Jones, 2006; Sun & Anderson, 2012). Indeed, despite being the focus of over 900 academic articles, Lane et al. (2006: 833) argue that researchers have failed to incorporate the role of individuals into AC models: From a practical perspective, omitting individuals from absorptive capacity models suggests that they are not important to knowledge processing. Yet, in the real world, executives of knowledge-intensive firms routinely worry about the fact that their core asset goes home every night. From a theoretical perspective, overlooking the role of individuals not only overlooks a key component of Cohen and Levinthal’s (1990) logic but suggests that absorptive capacity is fundamentally an algorithmic matching process: develop X amount of absorptive capacity in Y, and then your firm can learn Z. But what creates competitive advantage out of knowledge is the unique and valuable ways in which it is combined and applied. (Lane et al., 2006: 853-854) (emphasis added).

We develop theoretical support for why organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) of employees contribute to the “unique and valuable ways” that organizations acquire, assimilate/transform and exploit new knowledge, which are the very foundations of AC. Prior work finds that it is often the informal, non-prescribed interactions of individuals that leads to learning within organizations (e.g., Obembe, 2013). By its very definition, organizational citizenship behavior – “individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and in the aggregate promotes the efficient and effective functioning of the organization” (Organ, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie, 2006: 3) – suggests that OCBs are precisely the types of behavior that fill the gaps between how firms have organized their learning processes and what is actually needed for them to create competitive advantage.

Employees who engage in OCBs are often referred to as “good soldiers” because of their willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty (Organ, 1988), that is, to engage in these relatively discretionary and less explicitly rewarded behaviors in order to improve the “efficient and effective functioning” of organizations (Organ et al., 2006). Organ and colleagues identified several ways in which OCBs may accomplish this, including enhancing coworker productivity and improving coordination of team effort (see p. 200–۲۰۲). Building on their intuition, we propose another way that OCBs contribute to organizational effectiveness: by enhancing each of the four learning capabilities that comprise AC. More specifically, we argue that these discretionary behaviors can be the vital link in the AC process that fills the gap between how AC learning capabilities are formally structured and how they need to operate in order to generate a competitive advantage.