Team Disseminative Capacity: Exploring the Role of Collaborative Processes in Creating, Implementing, and Embedding New Knowledge

Abstract

Organizations strongly rely on their teams’ abilities to absorb and disseminate knowledge to remain innovative. Prior research has focused primarily on knowledge absorption and the few studies investigating disseminative capacity (DCAP) identified disseminator and recipient characteristics as contributing factors toward effective organizational knowledge transfer. This study investigates the concept of team DCAP by shifting the focus to the role of disseminator–recipient interactions and collaborations during the dissemination process. Adopting a process perspective, we examine five technology transfer initiatives within a large multinational firm in Australia by collecting narratives from 34 members of both disseminating and recipient teams on the emergent processes through which each technology is created, transferred, and embedded at the recipient site. Findings reveal that in instances when knowledge is initially co-created through perspective taking and collective sensemaking among disseminators and recipients, such collaborations have a spill-over effect and continue throughout subsequent implementation and embedding processes, resulting in more effective transfer initiatives. This study contributes new and important insights for transforming the role of recipients from passive receivers of knowledge at the end of the transfer process as often depicted in previous studies, to active collaborators from the very beginning of the transfer process, starting with knowledge co-creation.