Team intuition and creativity in new product development projects: A multi-faceted perspective

Abstract

Team intuition and creativity are growing research areas in the new product development (NPD) literature. However, past studies superficially investigated the relationship between team intuition and team creativity, in terms of team outcome, based on the narrow conceptualization and operationalization of team intuition in the NPD literature. In this study, we first explore the different aspects of team intuition by conducting 18 interviews on 4 different NPD projects in a phenomenographic study. We discover that team intuition has different aspects, namely, the holistic, affective, inferential, attitudinal, free, social, and moral in this qualitative study. We also noticed that each aspect has different features that distinguish it. Second, we tested the effect of team intuition aspects on team creativity, using a fuzzy-sets qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) in a quantitative study. By investigating 148 NPD teams, we found that affective intuition is a core and yet still an absent condition for full higher team creativity. Inferential intuition is a core and necessary condition for higher team creativity. In a complementary Partially Least Square (PLS) analysis, we found that the positive influence of affective intuition on team creativity is achieved by using other team intuition aspects (i.e., social, free and attitudinal aspects). We also determined that moral and social intuition are the gateways between affective intuition and other intuitions, i.e., free, inferential, holistic, and attitudinal. Further, we found that inferential intuition is positively associated with team creativity. We then discussed the theoretical and managerial implications of all our findings.