Grounding Dynamic Capabilities: How Temporal Orientation and Organizational Coupling Shape Individual Actions

Dynamic capabilities are central to organizations’ development. Scholars have shown that individuals play a key role in enacting the routines that create dynamic capabilities. However, they have not explored how variation in individuals’ enactment of routines shape the creation of dynamic capabilities. To address this question, we conducted an extensive qualitative study of whether or not researchers in the biomedical field who received a large-scale grant were able to use this funding to attract additional funding. We grouped the researchers into four types based on their ability to develop dynamic capabilities to attract additional funding: disruptors, synergizers, subsumed, and isolated. Disrupters and synergizers created dynamic capabilities whereas the subsumed and the isolated did not. Exploring the mechanisms that drove this variation, we found that all researchers enacted a bundled routine which consisted of the two routines – recombining resources and acquiring resources – that were constituted by seven actions. The four types enacted the bundled routine differently depending on two factors – their temporal orientation and their organizational coupling – and how they enacted the routine shaped their creation of dynamic capabilities. Our study extends the literature on dynamic capabilities by identifying individual variation in the processes that generate dynamic capabilities and by highlighting how this variation is driven by individuals’ temporal orientation and their organizational coupling.