Making Employees Interpretation of Product Development Work Comprehensible Using a Grounded Theory Approach

This paper demonstrates how an inspired grounded theory approach can be used as a research method to comprehend participants' interpretation of product development work. Since, this paper deals with an inspired grounded theory approach, it means adjustments to the more traditional grounded theory approaches have been done (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1997). The paper focuses on how employees reflect on their participation in product development projects. To understand how this happened, specific individuals participating in specific product development projects were followed over 13 months. Consequently the operative level within product development was investigated, focusing on how the participants interpret the process. Being inspired by grounded theory I wanted to focus on the processes that bring about knowledge, and to make a consistent and holistic representation of findings to avoid 'the building block world view' representation (Addleson, 2001: 177). According to Addleson (2001) a 'building block world view' is defined as 'a world where tasks and goals are concrete, discrete, easily identified, and are capable of being enumerated and ordered, and a world where tasks exist independently of what people think or believe' (Addleson, 2001: 177). Through this process knowledge harvesting, emerged as a concept that encompasses how inclusion and exclusion mechanisms, a flexible and coordinate project planning and the project manager's compliance, influences employees understanding, and adjustment to product development work. These concepts advocates a more organic understanding of product development where practice and learning, inseparably bound, evolve based on human interaction through collaborations, discussions, emotions, preconceptions and authority continuously supervised by adopted methods, routines and procedures.