Research Article
The Impact of Organizational Culture on New Product Development Management
Chungbuk National University
Chungbuk National University
Published: January 2007 · Vol. 36, No. 1 · pp. 133-157
Full Text PDF
Abstract
It is argued that a firm should apply different approaches in managing new product development according to new product innovativeness. However, there exist some debates as to what approach a firm should pursue in developing very innovative new products. Some scholars argued that emphasizing on more infrastructural development activities (e.g., team building, support from top management, and interdepartmental communication, etc.) is effective for the successful development of new products with high innovativeness. In contrast, others prefer structural development activities (e.g., new product development process activities including idea screening, product design, process engineering, and testing, etc.) to infrastructural development ones. Meanwhiles, literature addressing the impact of organizational culture on management provides the following proposition: organizational culture might have moderating effect in such a way that in the entrepreneurial organization, infrastructural development activities would contribute to increasing new product performance of very innovative new products more than in the case of structural ones, while in the conservative organizations, vice versa. The purpose of this study is to test this proposition, that is, to examine the moderating effect of organizational culture (i.e., entrepreneurial vs. conservative) on new product development management in an empirical manner. The research results reveal that infrastructural development activities directly have greater effect on new product performance, regardless of new product innovativeness, in the entrepreneurial organizations, while structural developments activities having greater effect. regardless of new product innovativeness, in the conservative organizations. In addition, it is found that when entrepreneurial organizations are developing very innovative new products, it is also desirable for them to capitalize on more infrastructural development activities, while the reinforcing of more structural development activities for developing very innovative new products is effective for conservative organizations. These research results shed some insights on the effective new product development management as follows. First, a firm should take its characteristics of organizational culture into consideration in prioritizing development activities. If a firm has more entrepreneurial organizational culture, its effective way of new product development is to leverage more infrastructural activities that entrepreneurial culture has strength in carrying out. On the contrary, if a firm has more conservative organizational culture, its effective way of new product development is to leverage more structural activities that conservative culture has strength in carrying out. Second, some studies argue that there is unitary organizational culture having positive impact on the successful development of new products. However, the results of this study show that there is not such organizational culture, and that the successful development of new products is dependent on the fit between new product development activities (infrastructural and structural) and organizational culture. Third, when a firm tries to introduce new activities, it should examine whether the focal activities are congruent with its organizational culture. In other words, firms should benchmark world-class new product development activities that their organizational culture is well matched with.
