Impacts of external involvement on new product development performance: moderating role of organisational culture

In this work, the impact of external involvement on new product development (NPD) performance was explored from the knowledge-based and resources-based views. By placing organisational culture within the competing value framework, the moderating effects of multiple dimensions of organisational culture were investigated. With empirical survey data from the high-performance manufacturing project across 10 countries and 3 industries, the hypothesised relationships were tested by hierarchical regression approach. The results highlighted that the specific cultural dimensions are statistically related to external involvement effectiveness. Development culture and group culture positively moderate the impacts of customer/supplier involvement on NPD performance. By contrast, rational culture's moderating effects are not significant and hierarchical culture negatively moderates the relationship between customer involvement and NPD performance. In particular, the information and resource derived from external customers and suppliers cannot be effectively integrated into NPD process in the absence of appropriate organisational culture, thus leading to a poor NPD performance.