Organizations increasingly set up multiteam projects for the development of highly complex products. While team research has emphasized the importance of team-internal processes for smaller scale projects, we know little about collaborative processes (especially between teams) in such large-scale projects. This study utilizes a multi-informant longitudinal research design on a product development project (39 teams, 36 months) in the European automotive industry investigating collaboration between and within teams. The results of the study demonstrate that interteam coordination, project commitment, and teamwork quality as rated by the team members at Time 1 (Month 12; end of concept phase) are significantly correlated to project managers’ ratings of overall team performance at Time 3 (Month 36; end of project). The process variables measured at Time 2 (Month 24; end of design phase) display generally weaker correlations with team performance at Time 3. Multiple regression analyses further detail the effects of collaborative processes within and between teams on different measures of team performance (i.e., overall performance, quality, budget, schedule). The results show that collaborative processes during the project have predictive properties in regard to later team performance and can serve as early warning indicators. Furthermore, the results of this study provide support for our hypotheses predicting positive relationships between interteam coordination, project commitment, and teamwork quality. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.

In this article we examine project-level and team-level managerial functions aimed at managing inter-team task interdependencies and investigate their effect on the performance of teams in a multi-team product development project. We hypothesize that team interface management (a team-level function) performed in the concept phase of a project, rather than the later development phase, is positively related to team performance at the project's conclusion (i.e. product quality, product cost, development budget, development time). Furthermore, we argue that project structuring and support (a project-level function) is important in both the concept and the development phases. We test our hypotheses empirically based on a 36 months longitudinal study of a product development project in the European automotive industry comprising 39 teams. The results show that team interface management is particularly important during the concept phase of the project. Project structuring and support is most important in the development phase of the project, while hindering team performance in the concept phase. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005.

Most any industry is experiencing increasingly fast-paced competitive environments with profound and abrupt changes in technologies and markets. This development puts increasing demands on businesses as they aim to adapt to changing conditions, with more and more organizations transforming to team-based structures, where project teams, often with members from different functional areas, are charged with providing the necessary flexibility to react quickly to technological and market changes.The proliferation of such team-based organizational designs, however, has profound implications for the enactment of leadership in organizations. Whereas dyadic relations between leader (mostly an individual) and followers (an individual or a group) could in the past be clearly recognized, these respective roles become more and more blurred today (Manz and Sims, 1987). Particularly since the 1980s, scholars have defined team leadership in terms of roles and functions that are shared and commonly performed by multiple or all team members (Hackman and Walton, 1986;Manz and Sims, 1987). It is argued that team managers can perform leadership functions by themselves; however, that it is unlikely that they incorporate all the skills necessary (Mohrman et al., 1995). The merit of this functional approach is that it: . . . leaves room for an indefinite number of specific ways to get a critical function accomplished (Hackman and Walton, 1986, p. 77).

No abstract

No abstract