Why teams matter in customer involvement-The moderating effects of team social cohesion and team autonomy

The rise of customer involvement challenges our understanding of what success factors influence the innovativeness of new product development (NPD). With teams increasingly shaping firms' collaborative NPD efforts with customers, team-related factors become increasingly important. Drawing from social identity and organizational information processing literature, we investigate the interactions between intra- and inter-team relations, and two customer involvement modes in pursuit of new product innovativeness. Based on a sample of 277 NPD managers, we establish team social cohesion (intra-team relations) and team autonomy (inter-team relations) as success factors in customer involvement. Whereas team social cohesion augments traditional customer involvement approaches but has no effect on more collaborative approaches, team autonomy exhibits a bipolar effect, harming traditional customer involvement approaches, but benefitting more collaborative approaches. Accordingly, NPD managers need to tailor their teams' setup to the specific mode of customer involvement and to carefully manage the bipolarity of team autonomy.