The use of international R&D teams: an empirical investigation of selected contingency factors

Today, many organizations are adopting streamlined, adaptive hierarchies that increasingly employ teams in daily operations. This paper focuses on the use of teams in international R&D networks. Specifically, it investigates the incidence of R&D teams and analyses the influence of four contingency factors on team utilization. The four contingency factors are cultural distance, geographic distance, the research mandate and the market mandate of the local R&D unit. Based on a survey conducted in 2000, we present empirical evidence on 49 leading German MNCs, accounting for 66% of the nations' privately funded R&D in 1999. Our results clearly demonstrate that firms increasingly use international teams as a means of coordinating such projects. The type of work conducted by an international R&D unit has a strong bearing on the utilization of teams. The latter is linked to a mandate of an R&D unit as "capability exploiting" rather than "capability augmenting." Also, R&D units with a "global mandate" are more likely to use international teams as a coordination mechanism. On the other hand, we do not find support for geographical or cultural distance as determining factors for the use of international R&D teams.