The effect of ambiguity, conflict and anxiety on team’s job satisfaction and new product performance.

Resumen

With a few exceptions, the subject of stress and its impact on performance has received limited empirical attention in the new product development (NPD) literature. Nevertheless, stress is an individual and collective reality in NPD teams settings. NPD projects involve high level of task-related job complexity, process and environmental uncertainty, and therefore it is reasonable for NPD teams to experience stress. Further, their job requires solving the often conflicting expectations of different functional areas and the potentially ambiguous guidance from management. Taken into account the importance of the topic and the scarce empirical literature, this study examines the influence of a number of team stressors on team’s job satisfaction and new product performance. Specifically, we focus on three team-stressors: team-role ambiguity, team-role conflict and team anxiety. In this study, new product performance is measured along three dimensions: adherence to budget and schedule, product quality and market success.