The role of procedural justice in the new product development process

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents and consequences of the level of procedural justice climate in new product development (NPD) teams. The aim is to discover answers to the following questions: First, can the procedural justice climate level be used to predict NPD team outcomes such as product performance and product creativity? Second, what NPD team characteristics can be leveraged to improve the justice climate? Design/methodology/approach - A theoretical model was developed and tested on the survey data collected from 93 product managers of Turkish companies. The product managers who participated in this study represented various industries, including those of telecommunications, food, material, software, machinery, chemicals, and service technologies. Findings - Statistical analyses demonstrated that stability, collectivism, and moderate-level functional diversity of teams were significantly related to the procedural justice climate. In addition, procedural justice climate had significant positive impacts on new product creativity and speed to market. Such impacts were found to be more significant with regard to high-turbulence conditions. Originality/value - This paper is the first attempt to explore the role of procedural justice in NPD teams.