PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT

Product Development Management

Product Development Management

Introduction

New product development (NPD) activities require concurrent involvement of cross-functional teams in and across various stages of the project (Koufteros and Marcoulides, 2006, 97-133; Clark and Fujimoto, 1991, 107-18). These investigations and others have hypothesized the significance of cross-functional groups for better task outcomes. However, double-checking work integration and sustaining coherent decisions over the task in such a cross-functional environment is a intimidating task as cross-functional group constituents generally have vying communal persona and loyalties (Holland et al., 2000, 25-32; Webber, 2001, 39-50). Each function (production, R&D, trading, technology, etc.) functions in a fragmented and separated kind and tends to identify powerfully with its own function. Barriers of communication exist and, complex problems are not resolved in a timely and consistent manner across the project stages (Ashforth and Mael, 1989, 301-13). A cross-functional NPD team tends to deny the existence of its own trade-off decisions compared to others (Hong et al., 2004, 52-64) which can lead to frequent conflicts and incoherent decisions among the team members. This can adversely impact the overall NPD performance objectives in terms of cost, quality, and development time (Herrmann and Schmidt, 2002, 84-110). Whead covering brings such varied team constituents together to coordinate, integrate and execute task jobs is an influential task foremost, such as a heavyweight product manager (HW), who can set clearly recognised objectives, goals, directions, and engender synergy for the cross-functional group.

Research in organizational behavior has recognized the importance of different types of leadership in a general management context such as charismatic leadership (House, 1977, 15-21), supervisory leadership (House and Aditya, 1997, 179-202), upper echelon theory (Hambrick and Mason, 1984, 265-94), transformational leadership (Bass, 1985), visionary leadership (Bennis and Nanus, 1985, 169-84), etc. These and several other studies support the importance of leaders to build team synergy, reduce conflict and enhance team and organizational performance (Yukl, 1998, 1735-51). In an NPD project, the impact of cross-functional teams on the NPD process is strongly influenced by their leaders (Jassawalla and Sashittal, 2000, 9-28). Leaders in NPD projects can play significant functions in managing, guiding, and motivating varied team constituents in the direction of the common goals and objectives of the project. However, empirical research that examines the relationship between cross-functional team leadership, especially the HW, and NPD performance has been surprisingly limited (Gerwin and Barrowman, 2002, 107-18; Gemmill and Wilemon, 1994, 729-71; Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995, 1247-63). The present study aspires to connection the existing research gap by empirically revising the HW's role in the cross-functional team.

Existing literature on the HW has highlighted the importance of the formal influence (Wheelwright and Clark, 1992; Schilling and Hill, 1998) and also informal influence (Wheelwright and Clark, 1992, 343-78; Koufteros et al., 2002, 331-55) of such managers on the project and team. Based on general goal-setting idea, the objective of the current study is to empirically enquire the prescribed and inprescribed influence of the HW on the cross-functional merchandise development team. The aim is that this study can enhance the understanding ...