Absorptive capacity and performance in Chinese enterprises. Some empirical evidences

Over the last two decades absorptive capacity has become one of the most important constructs in organizational research and a critical element for firm’s long term survival and success. In emerging economies such as China, because of the significant role of absorptive capacity in facilitating and contributing to technology and knowledge transfer, enhanced innovation capabilities, and overall firm performance, the relevance and understanding of this concept is even more critical. Since it was firstly introduced by Cohen and Levinthal’s 1989 seminal work, the concept went through a number of modifications, extensions and reconceptualizations. One of the latest made by Lane, Koka and Pathak (2006) advocated the rejuvenation of absorptive capacity by looking at it beyond the traditional R&D-based perspective, as a capability rather than knowledge content or base. Building on this standpoint, the present work relies on a complementarity perspective between R&D and non-R&D operationalizations of absorptive capacity, along with an inductive approach, with the objective to shed light on the relationships between different operationalizations of the concept and firms’ performance in the context of Chinese enterprises. Using dataset of more than two thousand Chinese private manufacturing and service enterprises, we employed multiple regression and state-of-the-art bootstrapping techniques. A preliminary multi-dimensional and process-oriented model of absorptive capacity as related to performance is identified, and a number of theoretical and practical implications are drawn.