Discussions of Organizational Contextual Factors

First, unlike Taiwanese teams, whose speed-to-market pressure has a negative effect on new product quality, the speed-to-market pressure appears to be no significant effect for American teams. This finding of American teams appears to support the research conducted by Sethi (2000a). It confirms the belief by certain experts in the product development area that product development teams have the ability to perform well even under conditions of limited time to market the product (Smith & Reinersten, 1991; Takeuchi & Nonaka, 1986). This is

possibly because the steps required for cycle time reduction are quite predictable, so that teams are able to deal easily with speed-to-market pressure through various well-known strategies, such as simultaneous product development with overlapping stages. Clearly, this different result between Taiwanese and American teams stems from cultural differences. Collectivist Taiwanese teams may initially focus more effort on building social and interpersonal relations among their members, thus requiring more time to develop a high-quality while at the same time maintaining social relations. As such, the team’s ability to develop a quality product might be adversely affected by speed-to-market pressure.

Second, product innovativeness had a negative effect on new product quality for Taiwanese teams, but no significant effect for American teams. We further investigated the inconsistent result between Taiwanese and American teams by interviewing their leaders in depth, and found that the cause was attributed to our samples. The samples collected from the U.S.

mainly concentrated on the Johnson Space Center’s contractors of NASA and semiconductor design companies located in Dallas, which place an increased emphasis on innovative products and quality due to security and survival considerations; whereas the samples obtained from Taiwanese organization were widely distributed over different industries where there is less at stake. As a result, product innovativeness showed no influence on product quality for American teams because they incorporated the competencies required for developing a highly novel and high-quality product. It can be inferred therefore, that the adverse effect of product innovativeness on new product quality will decrease as new product development teams incorporate the competencies required for developing a highly novel product at the product development stage.

Third, for Taiwanese and American teams, quality orientation was found to be positively related to new product quality. This finding supports the results of prior studies in the field of

quality management (Bounds et al., 1994; Garvin, 1988). Since new product teams are heavily dependent on the resources and facilities of the functional departments in the firm, a lack of quality culture among these functional areas may hinder teams’ ability to translate ideas for improving quality into high quality products. Moreover, team members in a firm with a strong quality orientation are likely to be more attuned to pursuing continuous improvement programs to achieve higher quality.

Fourth, supplier involvement had no significant effect on new product quality for Taiwanese teams, but a negative effect for American teams. The results are very different from what we expected. Although Clark and Fujimoto (1991) and Imai et al. (1985) noted that supplier involvement in product development could cut the complexity of the product design process and improve the product concept, the effect of supplier involvement on new product quality seems to be no influence for Taiwanese and American teams. From our in-depth interviews with Taiwanese teams, we found that product development process could be faster and more productive if suppliers are involved in the product development process. Our results do not indicate that product quality will definitely be enhanced, which is consistent with Twigg’s (1998) findings. He compiled a typology of supplier involvement in new product development process from various sources, including specification, concept design, detailed design, and production design. This topology provides a basis for separately considering the requirements and participation of suppliers with different inputs. However, he suggests that it is vital but extremely difficult to involve suppliers early at the product specification stage, so that high product quality cannot be assured without suppliers’ full involvement in these four stages. As for American teams, the interpretation may be that American team members, who are individualists, performed more independent tasks, and would not be as receptive to supplier involvement in the product development process. Moreover, if supplier involvement does not come at the right stage, it may

have an adverse effect on product quality, for American teams. Thus, the specification stage of new product development process is the area needing further study.

Fifth, for Taiwanese and American teams, there was no effect of customer involvement on new product quality, even though Griffin and Hauser (1993) note that understanding the voice of the customer in new product development leads to the development of superior products that meet customer needs better than the competition. This is because incorporating the voice of the customer into new product development can be challenging. With extreme pressure to speed new products to market, NPDT may put inadequate effort into understanding their customers (Gupta

& Wilemon, 1990). However, Bonner (2005) found that output control and team rewards tend to increase the degree of customer interactivity. Therefore, under this structure, future research is needed to examine whether team members are more likely to seek involvement in customer discussions, increase the priority of customer knowledge, exert pressure on others to understand customers, and finally improve the new product quality.