Product Development Teams Formation: Effects of Organizational and Product Related Factors

While teams are an essential means for developing products in organizations, how to assemble product development teams remains largely unexplored. According to the social network research, teams might be arranged in either closely connected or sparse structures. Conceptualizing a product development project as collective problem solving endeavour, we develop a computational model of these projects in which a number of designers, who are arranged in teams with a particular structure, conduct search over an NK(C) performance landscape. Simulation of this model enables us to compare the design performance of teams with either closely connected or sparse structures. Our results indicate that how effectively organizations can integrate design solutions determines which of these two structures results in higher development performance.

In addition, with our simulation model, design performance of strategies that employ both closely connected and sparse teams, is contrasted with that of those policies which solely use either of these structures. We find that, regardless of product development project integration capability, strategies that simultaneously utilize both closely connected and sparse teams are likely to achieve higher development performance than the other strategies that only use teams with one particular structure. We discuss the implications of our findings in managing product development project.