Research Article
A Study on the Effects of Cross-Functional Integration and Multi-Functional Teams on New Product Development Process Management and New Product Development Performance
1 Inha University, 2 Sookmyung Women's University
Published: January 2015 · Vol. 44, No. 1 · pp. 397-428
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17287/kmr.2015.44.1.397
Full Text
Abstract
The ability for companies to launch new products timely might be an competitive advantagein an increasingly uncertain environment where competition between firms is getting fierce anddemand from customers is getting more diverse and complex. Until now, there have been a lotof studies that found out that cross-functional integration or cross-functional team building innew product development process can help firms to improve new product development performance. However, most of them considered only the integration between R&D and marketing departments,investigated the direct causal relationship between cross-functional integration and newproduct development performance repeatedly, or did not distinguish between cross-functionalintegration and cross-functional team although these two concepts are discriminable. Consequently,there exist some unexpected research results that cross-functional integration does not haveany influences on new product development performance or cross-functional team goes so far asto worsen new product development performance. The purpose of this study is to examine thecausal relationship between cross-functional integration, cross-functional team and new productdevelopment process management and investigate the positive impact which these three conceptshave on new product development performance empirically. In addition, this study aims atidentifying the mediating effect which new product development process management has onthe causal relationships between cross-functional integration and cross-functional team andnew product development performance. In order to address these research problems, targeting manufacturing companies which belong to four industries, automotive parts, telecommunicationunits, machinery and ship building industries and not only have R&D institute but also operatecross-functional team daily, we conducted questionnaire survey. After that we estimated structuralequation model targeting 277 samples and then produced some research results as follows. First, both two types of cross-functional integration, R&D-marketing and R&D-manufacturingintegration and cross functional team influence new product development process managementpositively. Second, these two integration also have positive influences on cross-functional team,which means that cross-functional integration can be an important factor for effective formulationof cross-functional team. Third, R&D-manufacturing integration as well as new product developmentprocess management has positive impact on new product development performance. Meanwhile,both R&D-marketing integration and cross-functional team do not have any effects on new productdevelopment performance. Lastly, new product development process management newly consideredas a mediator can transmit positive impacts from two types of cross-functional integration andcross-functional team to new product performance successfully. There are some theoreticalimplications in this study. Unlike prior research, this research distinguished cross-functionalintegration and cross-functional team and divided cross-functional integration into two types:R&D-marketing integration and R&D-manufacturing integration. Furthermore, by adoptingnew product development process management as a mediating variable, this study suggestednew path through which cross-functional integration and cross-functional team could influencenew product development performance indirectly. In the practical perspective, it is essentialthat manufacturing firms should revitalize cross-functional integration, cross-functional team,and new product development process management eagerly in order to increase the level of theperformance related to new products.
