R & D Team Improvisation And Innovation Performance

With increasing competition, managers sometimes have to abandon the traditional pre-planning; progress of science and technology makes the time of "decision" and "action" converge. Improvisation plays an important role in the condition of limited resources (such as time, money or understanding of the context). turbulent environments and high uncertainties, to solve unexpected problems and make the composition and execution simultaneously. On the other words, they can deal with unexpected problems or find opportunities use their spontaneity and creativity.Improvisation is an emerging area of research in management. The lacking of systematical research about the concept framework and the empirical study of improvisation, especially its inconsistent effects on innovation performance, making this study try to explore following research questions in Chinese context:How improvisation influences innovation performance? How this relationship is influenced by different levels of team climate and team heterogeneity? Basing on these research questions, this paper summarized the concept of improvisation, conceptual evolution, measurement dimensions and research levels of improvisation, and then examined how improvisation influences innovation performance at team level.This study analyzed R&D teams in Yangtze River Delta from team level analysis with 341 valid individual samples from 86 teams, using statistic tools such as SPSS and AMOS to process the empirical data. The main results are as follows:(1) Creativity of team improvisation enhances the innovation performance of R&D teams. (2) Team climate has a moderating effect on the relationship between improvisation and innovation. With higher level of team climate, there is more positive relationship between creativity of team improvisation and team innovation performance. (3) Team heterogeneity has a moderating effect on the relationship between improvisation and innovation. With higher level of team heterogeneity, the positive relationship between spontaneity of team improvisation and team innovation performance is strengthened, and the positive relationship between creativity of team improvisation and team innovation performance is weakened.This paper empirically studied the relationship between R&D team improvisation and innovation performance, not only enrich the relevant empirical research in China, but also provide Chinese organization managers with new and valuable ideas, contributing to the theoretical research of improvisation and innovation performance.