To seek to uncover the micro-foundations or individual-level origins of organizational absorptive capacity

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To seek to uncover the micro-foundations or individual-level origins of organizational absorptive capacity
Organizational Absorptive capacity
Organizations all over the world are adopting new strategies to expand and maintain a competitive advantage in the global market. To develop the best strategies for advancement requires a vast amount of knowledge, skill and expertise. The ability of an organization to establish that new knowledge and external information is valuable, incorporate it and use it to achieve commercial goals is known as the Organizational Absorption Capacity (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990, p.150). Successful firms have constantly sought to acquire new knowledge from the environment. However, any firm must have some prior knowledge to be able to assimilate more information and utilize it.
The process of acquiring and utilizing knowledge in an organization is best understood through three main levels of foci; individual level, group level, organizational level, national level and international level (Valentina and Giuseppina, 2009, p.272). In the recent past, scholars have paid much attention to inter-organizational knowledge sharing processes while neglecting individual knowledge sharing processes. However, all learning processes are subject to human thought processes that determine human conduct and define human interactions in social settings (Lotfali et al., 2011, p.60). This paper explores, individuals as micro-foundations of organizations absorption capacity. It is necessary to understand the micro foundations since; they lead to understanding the organization as a system including the impact of human interaction in the organization.
Individual-level origins of organizational absorptive capacity
Human beings are rational and determine the nature of the knowledge to acquire and the knowledge to reject, the knowledge to utilize and the information to store for future reference (Felin and Foss, 2000, p.442). In addition, it would not be possible to explore intra-organisational knowledge processes without understanding the nature of human beings, their behaviours and the causes of such behaviour in organisational settings (French, 1957, p.399).
Decisions in organisations are sums or choices selected from a variety of human opinions. According to French, the best decisions are group decisions since; they are made out of human interactions (French, 1957, p.400). People gather information from various settings and decide on how to effectively apply it to their firm for commercial purposes. People vary in their thought processes responsible for determining the kind of behaviours that jointly establish the organisational success (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990, p.152). It is therefore appropriate; to develop an understanding of the individual organisational absorption level before seeking to understand other levels. There are no decisions that can be made without applying human Co...