Team Leadership On The Mechanism Of Transfer Of Tacit Knowledge In New Product Development Team

This paper mainly studies that how team leaders in the process of new product development could create an environment favoring knowledge sharing to facilitate tacit knowledge transfer in new product development teams so as to generate collective knowledge and subsequently the innovation of knowledge.In high-tech enterprises, new product development teams are considered as the most important source of creativity which is stimulated basically by the teamwork. The research on knowledge management in new product development teams could be conducted in various aspects, but the paramount question is that how team leaders affect knowledge management. Leadership behaviors are important factors favoring tacit knowledge transfer, and proper leadership styles and leaders' influence could provide good conditions for tacit knowledge transfer.Our study extends the studies on organizational learning by exploring how team leaders affect tacit knowledge transfer in cross-functional new product development teams and subsequently improve the performances of the teams. Starting from organizational learning theory, this study analyses the mechanism how team leaders' characters affect tacit knowledge transfer in new product development teams of high-tech enterprises, and creates construct model and some hypotheses after the theoretical analyses of management literatures at home and abroad. After that, we acquire the sample data this study needs by a great deal of questionnaire research, analyzes empirically the construct model and hypotheses by structural equation modeling (SEM), and find some valuable research conclusions.We empirically demonstrate that tacit knowledge transfer has a strong positive effect on the innovativeness and speed to market of new products. Moreover, an involved leadership style, initiation of goal structure by the team leaders, and their influence on the organization were positively related to tacit knowledge transfer. Managerial implications of these research findings are discussed, and some human resources management policies and suggestions are given in terms of organization and personnel.