Informal contacts and performance in innovation teams

Abstract

Purpose -The paper addresses the effect friendly and friendship relationships among members of innovation teams on the performance of the teams. Design/methodology/approach -The members of innovation teams may develop friendly and friendship relationships over time. In our study, we focus on the effect of the frequency of such non-work relationships on team performance. For this research, we collected full network data on non-work relationships in a sample of 44 innovation teams and investigate how these "friendly and friendship networks" affect the performance of innovation teams. Findings -As result turns out that the frequency of friendly ties has positive as well as negative consequences on team performance, whereas the frequency of friendship ties positively relates to the performance.Research limitations/implications -The results indicate the importance of informal relations for the performance of innovation teams. Further, it is shown that friendly and friendship relations have different theoretical and practical implications. Future research can overcome the limitations of the presented research by concentrating on larger sample sizes and longitudinal research designs. Practical implications -Building on the results of the study managers can better orchestra innovation teams focussing not only on formal but also on informal contacts. The main practical implication is to strive for friendship contacts and to avoid too strong friendly contacts. Originality/value -The study adds knowledge to the research on informal relationships and performance two-fold. First, the findings testify that friendly and friendship contacts are different and not part of the same dimension, and there is strong evidence for the importance of informal contacts.

A review of creativity within organizations from a psychological perspective

“…According to Kratzer et al (2005), past studies have found contradicting results. They reviewed several studies regarding the effects of friendly versus friendship ties within innovation teams.…”

A comprehensive model of project team technical performance

“…Thamhain (2003) investigated the performance of R&D teams and provided commonly used indicators of innovative performance, such as response time, new products or services, product features, cost reduction, technology transfer, customer satisfaction, quality, continuous improvement, patents and publications, revenues from intellectual property, and business success. The following measures have also been used to evaluate innovation: the number of innovative ideas, methods, inventions, or applications generated (e.g., Bain et al, 2001;Kratzer et al, 2005Kratzer et al, , 2006Sundström and Zika-Viktorsson, 2009), the number of patents produced (e.g., Huang and Lin, 2006;Bain et al, 2001), the degree to which the product achieved novelty and introduced new insights to change market thinking (e.g., Dayan and Colak, 2008;Im et al, 2013;Lee, 2008), the implementation of new ideas to improve the quality of products and services (e.g., De Dreu, 2002), the degree of product or process improvement (e.g., Gerwin and Moffat, 1997;Heinz et al, 2006), and the ability of predicting and adjusting market and technology change (e.g., Thamhain, 2003;Wang, 2008).…”

Managing innovation through virtual global communities: Challenges and benefits

“…Barriers have also been identified as occurring at the level of the individual, the workgroup/team and the organisation (see for example [16]; [17]). Zwick [18] reviews employee resistance to innovation in relation to how future job security may affect whether they are cooperative when it comes to implementing change, which highlights the importance of making sure that motivational factors and goals are all working in the same direction for an innovation to succeed, particularly when utilizing VCs.…”