Team Disseminative Capacity: Can Teams Teach What They Learn?

Building upon the concept of absorptive capacity (ACAP) and its recent application at the team level, we conceptualize team disseminative capacity (DCAP) as the capability of teams to pass on knowledge to others. We employed an exploratory study using 34 semi-structured interviews with members of knowledge disseminating and recipient teams at a large multinational firm in Western Australia. The focus of our study was on how teams disseminate knowledge they have absorbed to other teams and sub-units across the organization. Our findings reveal that team DCAP involves the processes of knowledge co-creation, implementation, learning and integration. We found that intra-organizational knowledge transfer (team to team) was more effective when the knowledge was co-created. Antecedents of team DCAP include characteristics of knowledge, features of disseminating and recipient teams, the nature of inter-team relationships, and organizational factors. In addition, our findings reveal that increased team DCAP leads to extrinsic and intrinsic outcomes for disseminating teams and extrinsic and operational outcomes for recipients.