Temporary employment: Curse or blessing for a firm's absorptive capacity?
研究了临时雇佣对企业吸收能力不同维度（潜在吸收能力和实现吸收能力）的相反影响，发现临时雇佣促进知识获取但阻碍知识利用，并探讨了整合机制的作用。
Despite the importance of absorptive capacity (AC) for firms’ competitiveness, its antecedents are not yet fully understood. AC is a multidimensional construct, consisting of a firm's capability to acquire and assimilate new external knowledge (potential AC), followed by its capability to transform and exploit it (realized AC). Building on the insight that different AC dimensions vary in their nature and needs we predict that working with temporary employees will have an opposite effect on potential and realized AC. We test this proposition using firm-level data from the World Bank's Enterprise and Innovation Capability Survey for 2,228 firms in nine developing countries. We indeed find knowledge acquisition to benefit and knowledge exploitation to suffer from a firm's reliance on temporary employees. Our results thus identify a partial contradiction between the drivers of potential and realized AC. We find that a firm's integration mechanisms may potentially solve this contradiction. As all dimensions of AC are required for absorbing external knowledge, this research highlights an overlooked challenge.