Coupling Mechanism Of Mixed Incentives For Cross-functional Innovative Team Collaboration

With economic globalization spreading rapidly, great changes have been broughtin the environment of the market and core competition contents to the enterprises,which raise higher demands to the cross-boundary management of enterprises,knowledge innovation, and product cycle time. There is an increasing use ofcross-functional team to realize new product innovation and to sustain enterprisecompetitive advantage.Cross-functional team collaboration is one of the most important factors forcross-functional team success. However, there are too many collaboration dimensionsto distinguish the importance among them, and it is still unclear which are the keycollaboration dimensions of cross-functional team. Additionally, team members’cognition and consciousness are considered to be critical for cross-functionalcollaboration, and incentive mechanism is one of the effective measures fortransferring individuals’ recognition. But the existing research associated with newproduct development team mainly focuses on the effects of incentive mechanism onthe outcome and performance of team, rarely on the relationship between differenttypes of incentive measures and cross-functional collaboration.To fill these gaps, in this study, we focus on the topic of “how team-basedfinancial incentive and non-financial incentive influence cross-functional innovativeteam collaboration” in the context of integrative product innovation, and examine theeffects of team-based financial incentive and non-financial incentive on teamcollaboration, as well as the mutual effects of the mixed incentives. Research contentsand innovation points of this study are showed as follows:1. Research on key team collaboration dimensions based on process innovation andoutcome innovation. There are quite a lot of team collaboration d imensions it isdifficult to distinguish the importance among them. To solve this problem, we base onteam innovation performance and construct a key collaboration dimension model. Andwe establish the key collaboration dimensions according to the influences of differentcollaboration dimensions on innovation performance. 2. Research on coupling mechanism of team-based financial incentive andnon-financial incentive. The efficacy of financial incentive is always a controversialissue. One reason is that financial incentive is usually treated as a whole, thedifferences between team-based incentive and individual-based incentive areneglected. Thus, we examine the direct effects and mutual effects of team-basedfinancial incentive and non-financial incentive on team collaboration, as well as themoderating effects of team compositions, proposing a more comprehensive p icture forincentive mechanism.3. Research on the dynamic serviceability for coupling mechanism of mixedincentives. Most of the previous studies associated with incentive mechanism areconducted from a static perspective, which can hardly describe the ca usalrelationships between the variables. Aiming at this issue, we based on the team stagestheory, and conduct a longitudinal study to examine the dynamic causal relationshipsbetween the variables. Moreover, the team collaboration scale can hardly show themicro collaboration relationship among team members. In order to increase thevisualization of team members’ relationships, we also use social network analysis toshow the cross-functional team collaboration network, providing a new perspective tomeasure team collaboration form a micro-view.