Team Trust and Team Learning in New Product Development Projects

One of the most significant current discussions in project management and innovation management literature is New Product Development (NPD) projects, and they are enormously clear environments to be observed the terms of uncertainty, turbulence and volatility. Continuous improvement and learning is vital for NPD project teams and, hence, they are better able to take advantage of new opportunities in the complexity of today’s business markets. Team trust supports team creativity and learning, and promotes a better learning climate in an organization, and so team trust is especially crucial for uncertain and turbulence environments which require special capabilities such as adaptability, creativity, learning etc. In this study, we focus on examining whether there is a mediation effect of team trust between team factors, which are team autonomy, team member experience and team stability, and team learning.

Findings support that team autonomy, team stability, and team member experience are significantly and positively associated with team trust. Also, mediation influences have been tested between team factors and team learning through team trust. There is complementary mediation between team autonomy and team member experience, and team learning. Also, there is indirect-only mediation between team stability and team learning. Hence, team trust provides better relationship between team factors and team learning.

This study has explored the importance of team trust for team learning. Trust becomes prominent by affecting outcomes and processes indirectly and changes relationships in team. It is also apparent from this study that team trust changes relations and the degree of effect among variables. This situation reflects importance of trust in project teams as so an important variable in organizations studies. Trust holds team together and opens ways to develop and survive good relations and network in team. Another result to emerge from this study is that team trust fully mediates the relationship between team stability and team learning. Our results reveal that if team members trust each other, team might have a learning climate for members. So, this result emphasizes the importance of trust by demonstrating that team members do not be part of team learning without trust, no matter if they have been working together for a long time.