Formal and Informal Communication in New Product Development Teams: The Mediation Effect of Team Trust

Abstract

New product development (NPD) projects are costly, and fragile against failures as compared to other structures. This study has a holistic view of team factors to examine their relationship with team communication. Communication contributes to technical and practical processes such as learning, new idea development, and creativity. Trust has become prominent by affecting outcomes and processes indirectly, and changing relationships within team. This paper attempted to offer a contribution to the technology and innovation management (TIM) literature by presenting a model for researchers and project managers to understand potential interrelationships among team level factors (team autonomy, stability, member experience, and empowerment), team trust, and team formal and informal communication in NPD teams.

How Covid-19 Enabled a Global Student Design Team to Achieve Breakthrough Innovation

“…This team demonstrated strong connectedness, and a positive attitude towards each other, even during stressful, challenging times (Jung & Leifer, 2011). The authors were able to observe the mix of formal task-oriented interaction together with informal communication (Törlind & Larsson, 2002) during the most intense preparation work before EXPE. They managed to deliver a near-perfect EXPE experience, in terms of presentation, in terms of online marketing material and in terms of a fully functioning prototype, and they did it online, during a pandemic.…”

The Role of Informal Communication Within Multinational Interior Design Teams During Virtual Collaboration

“…Although increasingly critical to businesses, the beneficial aspects of communication and cultural differences in the improvement of team collaboration in virtual environments remain under-researched, with academic work lagging far behind practice (Hıdıroglu, 2020;Polat, 2018;Waizenegger et al, 2020) especially after the COVID-19 pandemic (Koch & Denner, 2022). The objective of this research is to investigate the influence of the informal communication on the collaboration of multinational interior design teams while collaborating in a virtual environment.…”

“…for interior designers to communicate their ideas as effectively (Nubani & Lee, 2022;Rashdan & Ashour, 2020, 2022. According to former research (Eckert et al, 2005;Polat, 2018;Rashdan & Ashour, 2020), more communication among members increases the exchange of information and consequently generates more ideas, but they did not address how to achieve more communication in these teams. Informal communication may fill this gap by promoting participant's perception of each other and creating a more friendly environment to interact.…”

“…Communication is vital for team collaboration because every technical and practical development such as idea generation relies on it (Polat, 2018). Communication is defined as a simultaneous conversation regardless if it takes place at the same time in the same location or not (Fish et al, 1992;Kraut et al, 1990;Polat, 2018;Serttaş, 2021). And what always it entails is, the transmission of information from a sender to a receiver via a medium (Cooren, 2018).…”

“…Work-related communications in any format (i.e. oral, text, pictorial) consider as formal communication and (Koch & Denner, 2022) in contrast any communication between two or more people who do not aim to address work-related tasks is considered informal communication (Koch & Denner, 2022;Polat, 2018). Waizenegger et al (2020) explains that, when formal and social communication of teams occur in virtual environments, team members become socially and professionally integrated.…”