Exploring catalysts that support employee’s transformation for unlearning and innovation by challenging the irreversibility of absorptive capacity: the case of commercial banks in Egypt

The purpose of this research is to explore catalysts that support employee’s transformation for unlearning and innovations by challenging the irreversibility of absorptive capacity.
The qualitative research uses a semi-structured interview design with a sample of six senior managers of commercial banks operating in Egypt to investigate the underpinning constituents that support the transformation phase for innovations.
Findings indicate that Senior managers are pressured by the strategy paradox of competitive counterparts and increasing customer demand and had to implement unlearning by transforming their apprentices and newly appointed employees to the new organizational paradigm, standards and regulations, before new learning and resulting innovation could occur. This challenges the principles of irreversibility of absorptive capacity. The research therefore proposes a framework which contains the catalysts that support employees’ transformation for unlearning by challenging the irreversibility of such absorptive capacity and locates the transformation phase as a backbone of the process.
Therefore, through an empirical investigation of the role of transformation mechanism on commercial banks’ absorptive capacity, this research extends and challenges the notion of linearity and irreversibility of absorptive capacity. It extends and develops the context of absorptive capacity held, by empirically establishing that the realized transformation phase can precede the potential phase of the model and expands the current literature by proposing a novel framework for managerial implications.