رهبری تحول گرا و ظرفیت جذب: آنالیز کاتالیزورهای سازمانی برای این رابطه Transformational leadership and absorptive capacity: an analysis of the organisational catalysts for this relationship

1. Introduction Absorptive capacity (AC) is usually conceptualised as a dynamic capability that allows firms to generate competitive advantages from the external sources available in the environment (Zahra and George 2002; Lane, Koka, and Pathak 2006; Flor and Oltra 2013; Flatten, Adams, and Brettel 2015). This explains the increasing interest in research identifying its main antecedents. According to Cohen and Levinthal (1990), a firm’s AC does not simply depend on the organisation’s direct interface with the external environment; but also on the transfer of knowledge across and within subunits and on the capacity to apply that knowledge. That is to say, AC is an organisational process (Cohen and Levinthal 1990; Flor and Oltra 2013), which depends on the organisational context and practices. In spite of that, research on the intra-organisational antecedents of AC is scarce (Flatten, Adams, and Brettel 2015). This paper examines the role of leadership as an antecedent of AC. Literature notes that top management leaders influence each element of the learning system and therefore AC (Bass 1985; Wang et al. 2011) because they are crucial in putting forward the organisational context that fosters the absorption, assimilation and application of knowledge. According to previous research, the leadership style that fosters the most learning processes is transformational leadership (TL) (Garcia-Morales, Llorens-Montes and Verdu-Jover 2008; Sun and Anderson 2012; Flatten, Adams, and Brettel 2015). However, the research on this connection is still scarce and literature on this field highlights the need for additional research in this line (Volberda, Foss, and Lyles 2010; Sun and Anderson 2012). Furthermore, understanding the organisational catalysts by which TL exerts its influence on AC requires further research (Volberda, Foss, and Lyles 2010; Sun and Anderson 2012; Dinh et al. 2014). The present paper tries to fill this gap in the literature. Following Jung, Chow, and Wu (2003), we suggest that TL affects AC because the former encourages the employees’ behaviours and the organisational practices that organisational learning requires. The objective of this paper is to examine whether different organisational characteristics aimed at facilitating organisational learning mediate the relationship between TL and AC. This study contributes in opening the black box between TL and AC. This paper is structured as follows. In Sections 2 and 3, we provide a literature review on the relationships among TL, AC and organisational learning facilitators and propose the research hypotheses. In Section 4, we describe the methodology of the empirical study. In Section 5, we present the results obtained through partial least squares analyses. Finally, in Section 6, we discuss conclusions and implications.