"have a poor ability" is grammatically correct and can be used in written English.
You can use it to describe someone's lack of skill or proficiency in a certain area. Example: Despite his love for cooking, John has a poor ability in the kitchen and often burns his dishes.
Humans generally have a poor ability to understand the probability of events, and websites are fairly poor at communicating them.
Patients with osteoarthritis have a poor ability to kneel preoperatively.
Conversely species in the group have a poor ability to seed dispersal.
For example, children have a poor ability to judge their own competency relative to their peers in a variety of tasks, often overestimating their own abilities.
These results suggest that age-0 Silver Carp are capable of leaping, but they have a poor ability to voluntarily cross waterfalls and appear to avoid the downstream turbulence produced by waterfall conditions.
However, fish have a poor ability to metabolise and excrete fenvalerate, since they seem to be deficient in the enzyme system that hydrolyzes pyrethroids (Bradbury et al. 1985; Haya 1989), and thus are susceptible to even minute concentration of the pesticide.
So, the SHR rats may have a poorer ability of set-shifting compared to other strains.
However, providers' perceptions that illiterate patients have a poorer ability to adhere may have important implications for how they interact with and provide counselling to patients with less education.
Electrical treatment at 100 °C under atmospheric pressure has a poor ability to inactivate Bacillus subtilis spores.
Investigations of microstructure and retained austenite content reveal that the intrinsic microstructure of maraging steels has a poor ability to work harden.
On the other hand, the polymerization mediated by 2 at 80 °C showed a good 'livingness' of polymerization, but 1 had a poor ability to control the polymerization to give poly(St) with a broad polydispersity of 1.52.
