Team Intuition as a Continuum Construct and New Product Creativity : The Role of Environmental Turbulence, Team Experience, and Stress

Although past research has reported the benefits of intuition in new product decision-making (i.e., higher quality product; enhanced customer satisfaction), intuition has largely been studied as an individual phenomenon and little work has examined the role of intuition on new product development (NPD) project teams. Furthermore, in a turbulent environment, NPD project teams may rely more on intuitive judgments, and other factors such as experience and stress may also influence the relationship between team intuition and team decision making. Drawing from the organizational design literature on creativity in decision making, this study builds a conceptual model of NPD team intuition and its effect on the team's ability to generate creative new products. We then derive hypotheses regarding team intuition, stress, environmental turbulence, and new product creativity, and test the hypotheses using data from a sample of 155 firms operating in Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey. We specifically test whether an inverted-U relationship exists between team intuition and new product creativity (that is, a balance of both intuitive and rational judgments is preferred), and whether this relationship is moderated by team experience and stress. Moreover, direct impact of turbulent conditions (i.e. market and technical turbulence) on intuition was also examined. The results of our empirical study with a sample of 310 new product/project developers and 155 project managers showed a positive and linear relation between turbulent conditions (both market and technical) and team intuition and an inverted U-shaped team intuition – new product creativity relation for teams with high experience and low stress. Finally, theoretical implications for future research and managerial implications for practitioners are discussed in the conclusion section