Research On Team Improvisation And Its Effects On New Product Development Performance

Nowadays, new product development (NPD) has became the key for the survival and development of enterprises, because it helps the enterprise gain market share, build its brands, decrease the operation risks, promote product portfolio, and further become the market leader. In comparatively stable environment, the enterprise can understand all activities of NPD in advance, and apply beforehand plans to simplify and optimize procedures of NPD, find out problems in advance, and further promote NPD efficiency. However, with the change of environment, the enterprise faces big challenges if it only relies on the beforehand planning and the past experiences.Under this condition, organizational improvisation has attracted much attention in NPD. Organizational improvisation theory asserts that NPD is a process with much uncertainty, and it relies on the improvisation experience and flexibility rather than the regular implementation of the planned procedures. The organizational improvisation emphasizes how to react timely and rightly to the change of the environment. That is, it attaches importance not only to the spontaneity and creativity but also to the quick responses of the members, and it also aims for efficiency and flexibility. Thus effective organizational improvisation is the key for the NPD in the dynamic environment. This dissertation aims at revealing the effects and mechanism of organizational improvisation to provide theoretical and practical implications for NPD activities of Chinese enterprises.This dissertation answers four questions to explain how NPD team implement organizational improvisation, including what are the features and dimensions of team improvisation? How does team improvisation affect NPD performance? What are the moderators in team improvisation affecting NPD performance? And what factors can promote NPD team improvisation?Based on the review of previous literature, this dissertation applies the content analysis to find out the key features of team improvisation, and identifies three dimensions including spontaneity, creativity and resource. The dissertation develops and verifies scales for these dimensions.The dissertation argues that team improvisation affects NPD performance such as the speed, cost efficiency, product innovativeness, and success, not only directly, but also indirectly through team learning and team flexibility. The dissertation proposes hypotheses and collects data by survey to prove them. Based on this, the dissertation reveals the routines of team improvisation affecting NPD performance.The dissertation explores the moderators of team improvisation affecting NPD performance from the perspective of team. The dissertation proposes that the team shared leader, the team openness to experience, transactive memory system, and team efficacy are the possible moderators. The empirical analysis results prove the moderating roles of the four factors, although there are some differences among them. This implies that the effective control of the four factors can improve team improvisation.The dissertation analyzes the effects of team stressors, team autonomy, goal clarity, team psychological safety, and team shared mental. The empirical analysis results show that all these factors can promote the incidence of team improvisation. To be specific, team autonomy and goal clarity exert significant influences on team improvisation; team stressors exerts significant influences on the spontaneity dimension; team psychological safety and team shared mental exert significant more influences on the creativity dimension and resource dimension. These findings shed light on the further promotion of team improvisation.Based on the above analysis, the dissertation constructs a system dynamics model of the causal relationship and the feedback relationship among NPD team improvisation, NPD performance and the influencing factors, to simulate the dynamics of team improvisation. The results show the dynamics of team improvisation under the effect of the factors inside the team, and the effects of outer environment, the composition and the development of the team, and the difference among personal capabilities on the change of improvisation.