New product quality and product development teams

Abstract

New product quality has been found to have a major influence on the market success and profitability of a new product. Firms are increasingly using cross-functional teams for product development in hopes of improving product quality yet researchers know little about how such teams affect quality. The author proposes and tests a series of hypotheses regarding how new product quality is affected by team characteristics (functional diversity and information integration) and contextual influences (time pressure, product innovativeness from the firm's perspective, customers' influence on the product development process, and quality orientation in the firm). The findings reveal that quality is positively related to information integration in the team, customers' influence on the product development process, and quality orientation in the firm. New product quality is negatively influenced by the innovativeness of the new product from the firm's perspective. However, information integration mitigates the negative effect of innovativeness on quality. Quality orientation weakens the relationship between information integration and quality. Time pressure and functional diversity do not have any effect on product quality.