A river runs between us - Legitimate roles and enacted practices in cross-functional product development teams

The use of cross-functional teams involving marketing and engineering functions has become commonplace in industry as a means to effectively develop new products. The practices, and indeed best practices enacted by such teams, will depend on team members' perceptions of their own role and the perceived roles of other team members. Individuals will tend to identify strongly with their archetypal disciplinary role. In this paper, we propose specific reasons why this is so and under what conditions individuals may take on more interdisciplinary roles. Specifically, we use institutional theory and organizational learning theory to posit that team members seek legitimacy by adopting and enacting archetypal functional roles, and that team members enact practices that conform to these roles; legitimate practices are selected via information and knowledge provided by external resources. This theory-building exercise is driven by examination of six different new product development teams, consisting of University of Minnesota graduate students in business and engineering. Teams work with faculty from business and engineering and an industrial sponsor to develop a physical prototype and new product business plan over a period of nine months. Data concerning team member perceptions and actions were collected via survey and event history construction, and were used to generate focus and propositions contained herein.