Exploring the absorptive capacity to innovation/productivity link for individual engineers engaged in IT enabled work

The hypothesis that absorptive capacity leads to greater innovation/productivity has been supported at the country, inter-organizational, organizational, and group levels. We adapted the absorptive capacity concept to individuals engaged in IT enabled engineering work, which is a situated and emergent phenomenon that requires individuals to posses or develop ability to acquire new task and computer knowledge; use or develop analytical and intuitive problem solving skills to assimilate and integrate these two types of knowledge; and apply them to their work. A model was developed linking the absorptive capacity of individuals, through enhanced IT utilization for problem solving/decision support, to task innovation and productivity. It was tested using a sample of 208 engineers using computers in their work. The results suggested that using IT innovatively and productively in such a work environment requires a mix of task knowledge, computer knowledge, and problem solving modalities.