Study On The Integration Patterns Btween R&d And Maketing Departments And Their Conflict Forms

This paper studies the integration patterns between R & D and marketing departments, and what relationship exists between two types of integration mechanism, interaction-based integration and collaboration-based integration. We focus on the dynamic and complex issue in the collaboration process, which is different from the extant literatures.A three-stage case research is arranged as follow: (1)Grounded theory is applied to a single case study to discover the related factors and the relationships among factors; (2)A multiple-case study is conducted with data collection on three cases; comparison and analysis of intra- and inter-case and inter-factor are carried after the reliability and validity testing. (3)Based on the proposed framework, system dynamics methodology is used to analyse causal relationships among different factors.The conclusions reveal that when the trust between R & D and marketing departments is high, the interaction-based integration have a positive effect on collaboration-based integration, meanwhile, resulting that the departmental conflict becomes cognitive conflict and the interaction level changes from low to high. However when the trust between R & D and marketing departments is low, the interaction-based integration have a negative effect on collaboration-based integration, thus the departmental conflict turns into emotional conflict and the interaction level changes from high to low. Therefore, the variable "trust" plays a moderate role for the conversion between cognitive conflict and emotional conflict.