Title: Assessing team members' interpersonal competencies in new product development e-projects

Authors: Kenneth David Strang

Addresses: APPC International Marketing Research, Long Island, NY, 11725, USA; University of Technology, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia

Abstract: Choosing team members for e-business New Product Development (NPD) projects can be difficult because the online context requires strong interpersonal skills, and geographically dispersed specialists often have diverse cultural backgrounds. This study identified instruments from the literature and then surveyed 1358 NPD team members in different e-business projects, within eight corporations spanning eight countries. The goal was to measure how positive and negative interpersonal competencies in NPD e-business teams affected their project performance. Self-report bias and exaggeration were controlled by incorporating social desirability markers. Demographics such as education, experience, age and gender were included for individual control. Project attributes such as team size, duration and industry were added for group control. Organisational-level controls consisted of size, region, manager age, NPD characteristics and sales force automation software. The instruments were validated and a multivariate model was proposed to help select effective NPD e-business team members.

Keywords: e-business project management; new product development; NPD teams; interpersonal competencies; interpersonal skills; electronic business; culture; multivariate modelling; team selection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPOM.2009.029105

International Journal of Project Organisation and Management, 2009 Vol.1 No.4, pp.335 - 357

Published online: 04 Nov 2009 *

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