Cross-functional interface and disruption in CRM projects: Is marketing from Venus and information systems from Mars?

Because of the inherently cross-functional nature of customer relationship management, the use of cross-functional teams in CRM project implementations is virtually mandatory to achieve critical marketing and sales objectives. This study examines the effects of functional membership as well as team and individual performance evaluations on project members' perceptions of disruption and cooperation during CRM project implementations. The results show that IS project members are more likely to perceive internal volatility and manifest interfunctional conflict and less likely to perceive interfunctional cooperation than project members from either sales/marketing or general management. We also find that team performance evaluations are negatively associated with disruption and positively associated with cooperation, while individual evaluations are negatively associated with internal volatility.     

Goals,Conflict, Politics,and Performance of Cross-Functional Sourcing Teams—Results from a Social Team Experiment

Strategic sourcing is carried out in cross-functional teams to account for the complexity and multidimensionality of modern procurement decisions. However, such teams not only enable the integration of distinct interdependent skill sets and viewpoints, they are also characterized by functional goal misalignment. We focus on the resulting behavioral challenges, namely conflict and politics, and their effects on team satisfaction and rationality, which ultimately leads to observed outcomes. We test our hypotheses in a structural equation model based on data gathered from 468 participants in a social team experiment. We find a mediated effect of goal misalignment on political behavior via two types of team conflict. Political behavior, in turn, obstructs rational team sourcing decisions and reduces team members’ satisfaction with the process. Our study indicates that behavioral challenges in the framework of Organizational Buying Behavior not only co-occur but affect each other via mediation. Hence, managers need to closely monitor the escalation chains’ origin, task conflict, which constitutes a necessary condition for further emotional dissent and political biasing. We contribute to the understanding of the challenges in cross-functional sourcing teams, thereby providing advice to executives in their pursuit to rationalize and improve sourcing team decisions and their outcomes.     

Improving relationships between sales and marketing: the relative effectiveness of cross-functional coordination mechanisms

ABSTRACT

The importance of effective sales and marketing working relationships is well known and this article examines the effectiveness of various coordination mechanisms used to improve this cross-functional relationship. Six coordination mechanisms are measured to identify their effect on sales and marketing conflict and collaboration, which in turn influence business performance. The results reveal that not all coordination mechanisms are equally effective. Structuring sales and marketing as a single unit and creating cross-functional project teams improve the interface, as do providing opportunities for job rotation and establishing cross-functional meetings. However, employing cross-functional training and co-locating sales and marketing do not influence this working relationship. Finally, reducing conflict and increasing collaboration between sales and marketing is shown to independently, and positively, influence business performance.     

Getting along long distance: understanding conflict in a multinational team through network analysis

Multinational companies (MNCs) create international teams to pool global talent and meet organizational goals. But the many differences among team members are fertile ground for conflict. While traditional conflict management techniques gather all team members together to resolve or minimize conflicts, geographic dispersion greatly increases the time, money, and disruption to daily workflow activities necessary to bring multinational teams together. We use a social network perspective to identify and prioritize conflicts to increase team effectiveness, allowing management to focus on the most critical conflicts first. Further, we show that the most critical conflict might not be between headquarters and country subsidiaries, but between two country subsidiaries.     

Individual Priming in Virtual Team Decision-Making

Virtual teams have different interactions than face-to-face teams because they rely on information and communication technologies, which can impede or assist certain human cognitive processes. Past research has shown that although virtual teams exchange more information than face-to-face teams, poor decisions often result, because team members do not consider the unique information they receive from others. Drawing from cognitive psychology, our research explored a unique way to improve team decision-making through the use of cognitive priming. We proposed that priming group members to pay attention to others or to engage in counterfactual thinking would improve team members’ cognition and, therefore, team performance. Prior research with individuals and brainstorming teams has shown these forms of priming to improve performance; however, no research has attempted to use priming to improve the outcomes of virtual team decision-making, which requires deeper interaction and cognitive involvement than brainstorming. We performed two lab experiments using primes that have been found to improve the individual decision-making process. We found that priming had some impact, but it did not significantly improve decision quality. Various reasons are discussed to explain why priming techniques may not be as powerful in teams as in individuals, and future research ideas are suggested to build on our initial work on priming in virtual team decision-making.     

Team deep-level diversity,relationship conflict,and team members' affective reactions: A cross-level investigation

Drawing from recent advances in the study of deep-level diversity in work teams and the similarity–attraction paradigm, this study examines the ways in which diversity in personality characteristics and preference for teamwork among team members influences the relationship between relationship conflict and subsequent team member affective reactions. Using a longitudinal, multilevel sample of 53 teams (260 respondents), results reveal that similarity or homogeneity in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability weakens the negative influence of relationship conflict on team member affective reactions, while heterogeneity in extraversion and preference for teamwork also weakens these relationships. A discussion of theoretical and practical implications follows.     

Familiarity and competence diversity in new product development teams: Effects on new product performance

When developing new products, most firms use cross-functional teams, but research on the effect of functional diversity on new product performance returns heterogeneous results. We propose a measure of competence diversity that is more comprehensive than the common functional diversity proxy. Empirical findings, based on a survey of 142 product and sales managers, support the improved predictive validity of our scale. We further observe a mediating effect of the instrumental use of information in the competence diversity–new product performance relationship. Finally, we discuss the moderating effect of familiarity among team members on the relationship between competence diversity and the instrumental use of information. All authors contributed equally to this article and are listed in random order.     

Three facets of satisfaction and their influence on the performance of innovation teams

This study investigates and demonstrates the mediating effect of job satisfaction between team deftness and team comprehension and the performance of 168 project teams involved in major innovation projects for their companies.The study demonstrates that there are at least three independent facets of job satisfaction: instrumental satisfaction with the way the task is progressing, social satisfaction with the way the team members interact with one another and the organization, and egocentric satisfaction with the individuals' perceived benefits to themselves.Previous studies have shown that innovation team performance is directly correlated with the two antecedents of performance: team deftness, which reflects how effectively the team works to achieve the innovation's purpose and team comprehension, which reflects how the team understands the linkages among key variables driving the innovation outcome. The study argues that these different facets of satisfaction differentially affect the ways in which team performance is affected by deftness and comprehension.There are three major results:

• 1.1. Social satisfaction mediates the relation between team deftness and performance—as social dissatisfaction of the team increases, it appears to impede the ability of the team to deploy its deftness in accomplishing the project's purpose.
• 2.2. Instrumental satisfaction mediates the relation between team comprehension and project performance—as instrumental dissatisfaction increases, it appears to impede the ability of the team to deploy its comprehension to accomplish the project's purpose.
• 3.3. Egocentric satisfaction does not appear to mediate the relation between team deftness and project performance.

Some managerial implications of these results are discussed.     

Communication Strategies and Marketing Performance: An Application of the Mohr and Nevin Framework to Intra-Organisational Cross-Functional Teams

Communication, and its key role in facilitating teamworking and knowledge management, is at the heart of research designed to understand the best approaches to managing teamwork and integration across functions and business partners. This understanding is necessary to improve the development of new products and services, and improve marketing efficiency. The research framework of Mohr and Nevin (1990) provides an interesting model, relating aspects of channel communication with channel performance, to achieve such improvements. Our model and hypotheses utilises Mohr and Nevin's unique framework as our starting point in examining the impact of communication strategy in intraorganisational cross-functional teams upon their team outcomes. We tested our model by collecting data from 42 organisational teams (237 respondents) and found that the model Mohr and Nevin proposed transfers well to the intra-organisational context. Our main finding supported the relationship between team communication behaviours and team performance. In addition, we found significant differences in this relationship depending upon the nature of the offer created by the industry (tangible good or intangible service) examined.     

Divergent and Convergent Idea Generation in Teams: A Comparison of Computer-Mediated and Face-to-Face Communication

Many tasks and decisions in business, including management consulting, are performed in group settings. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools (e.g., Lotus Notes) are increasingly being used by businesses to support teams in a variety of settings. Considerable research in information systems has demonstrated the advantages of electronic brainstorming (EBS) for generic tasks involving only divergent thinking. However, it is unclear whether the benefits of CMC extend to tasks that require both divergent and convergent processes. Per task–technology fit theory (TTF) (Zigurs and Buckland 1998), the use of computer-based group communication support tools, including chat systems in wide-spread use today, may be less effective for convergent processes than for divergent processes. This study experimentally compares the performance of computer-mediated and face-to-face (FTF) teams on tasks requiring both divergent and convergent processes. Consistent with theoretical predictions, the results revealed that computer-mediated teams outperformed FTF teams in the divergent aspects of the tasks, while FTF teams outperformed computer-mediated teams in the convergent aspects of the tasks.     

Ethics of managing interpersonal conflict in organizations

Although managers spend over twenty percent of their time in conflict management, organization theorists have provided very few guidelines to help them do their job ethically. This paper attempts to provide some guidelines so that organizational members can use the styles of handling interpersonal conflict, such as integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding, and compromising, with their superiors, subordinates, and peers ethically and effectively. It has been argued in this paper that, in general, each style of handling interpersonal conflict is appropriate if it is used to attain organization's proper end.M. Afzalur Rahim is Professor of Management at Western Kentucky University. He holds B.Com. (Hons.) and M.Com, M.B.A., and Ph.D. degrees. Dr. Rahim teaches courses on organizational behavior, strategic management, and management of organizational conflict. He is the author of over 65 articles and book chapters, five cases, and three research instruments on conflict and power. He is the author of six books, four of which are on conflict management. He is the editor of theInternational Journal of Conflict Management and theInternational Journal of Organizational Analysis. He is the founder of the International Association for Conflict Management and President of the International Conference on Advances in Management.Jan Edward Garrett is Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at Western Kentucky University. His recent publications include Persons, Kinds and Corporations: An Aristotelian Perspective, which appeared inPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Unredistributable Corporate Moral Responsibility, which appeared in this journal.Gabriel F. Buntzman is Associate Professor of Management at Western Kentucky University. His current research interests concern relationships between ethics, conflict and the strategic management of organizations. His work in the area of conflict management has appeared in theInternational Journal of Conflict Management, theJournal of Psychology, and three books.     

The Effects of Team Flexibility and Emotional Intelligence on Software Development Performance

As both business and technological environments change at an increasing rate, flexibility and emotional intelligence have become critical issues for project management. Even though previous research has examined the relationship between team flexibility and team performance and that between the emotional intelligence of teams and team outputs, there remains a gap in literature in respect to a holistic model. Accordingly in this paper, we examine the relationships among software team flexibility, emotional intelligence, and software project outputs (market success, speed to market, and the functionality of the new software product) using survey data from 86 software development projects. The results reveal positive a relationship between the diversity dimension of software project team flexibility and emotional intelligence. The first dimension of software team flexibility, team autonomy, positively affected market success, speed to market, and software functionality, whereas the second dimension, team diversity, positively affected only speed to market and software functionality. The emotional recognition of team members for both themselves and their teammates appears to be another important factor affecting the speed to market and functionality of the new software products. Managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.     

The Effects of Cultural Diversity in Virtual Teams Versus Face-to-Face Teams

Diversity in the national background and culture of team members is common in virtual teams. An experimental study, with short term teams, was undertaken to examine the effect of cultural diversity on team effectiveness and to examine if this effect changes depending if the team worked face-to-face (F2F) or virtually. Heterogeneous teams were created that had greater diversity than homogeneous teams of individualism/collectivism values, different languages spoken, country of birth, and nationality. The teams worked on a desert survival task either F2F or virtually (via audioconference and electronic chat tools). The overall results indicated that heterogeneous teams were less satisfied and cohesive and had more conflict than the homogeneous teams, although there were no statistical differences in team performance levels. However, examining just the heterogeneous teams found that the performance of the virtual heterogeneous teams was superior to that of the F2F heterogeneous teams. The results support Carte and Chidambaram's (2004) theory that the reductive capabilities of collaborative technologies are beneficial for newly-formed diverse teams.     

The anthropology of the supply chain: Fiefs,clans, witch-doctors and professors

Organizations in the West have learned the importance of organizing their businesses into cross-functional teams, focused on key business processes. In the future, even this will not be enough. Successful businesses will create value by implementing innovations across organizational boundaries: ‘cross-functional’ teams will become ‘cross-organizational’ teams. Supply chain management will need to nurture successful innovation within these cross-organizational teams. The fundamental challenges are social rather than technical, involving issues of trust, co-operation, power and politics. As a result of this, the roles and relationships required for best practice supply management are changing. This paper introduces new models that have been developed in order to understand the cultural context of customer-supplier relationships, and the roles and relationships needed for successful innovation in supply chains.     

Unpacking the relationship between an innovation strategy and firm performance: The role of task conflict and political activity

This article adds to extant literature by examining the contingent effect of two cross-functional processes on the relationship between the use of an innovation strategy and firm performance, namely, task conflict and political activity. The authors examine the effects of these processes with a sample of 260 firms. The positive relationship between the use of an innovation strategy and firm performance is stronger for higher levels of cross-functional task conflict and lower levels of cross-functional political activity. Furthermore, the authors find support for a configurational hypothesis: the innovation strategy-firm performance relationship is strongest for the high task conflict/low political activity configuration and weakest for the low task conflict/high political activity configuration. The results unveil two important cross-functional mechanisms influencing the extent to which the benefits of an innovation strategy can be reaped.     

Developing Cooperative Teams to Support Individual Performance and Well-Being in a Call Center in China

The theory of cooperation and competition, though developed in the West, may be useful to develop and analyze productive teamwork in China. Three hundred and sixty-eight employees from a call center participated in a cooperative teamwork 1-day workshop followed by daily practice. Results support the hypothesis that cooperative teams strengthen relationships, reduce turnover, and improve productivity of individual team members. During the 2-month period, team members increased the number of phones answered by nearly 40%, reduced customer complaints by over 55%, and lowered the turnover by over 20%, while the control call centers had either minor increases or decreases in these measures. These results support that the theory of cooperation and competition can guide the development of effective teams in China and that cooperative teams can improve the performance of individual employees.     

高管团队内情感冲突、企业家精神与公司成长性绩效关系的实证研究

根据对企业高层管理者访谈和163份有效问卷,重点分析高管团队内情感冲突、高管团队企业家精神和公司成长性绩效间的关系。实证研究发现:高管团队内情感冲突和公司成长性绩效显著负相关,高管团队内情感冲突与高管团队企业家精神显著负相关,高管团队企业家精神与公司成长性绩效显著正相关。并且,高管团队企业家精神在高管团队情感冲突对公司成长性绩效的影响过程中起着中介作用。     

A behavioral model of international channel relationships

Purpose: The main purpose of the study is to fill the existing gap in international relationship marketing (IRM) literature by developing and testing empirically a comprehensive conceptual model of firms’ relationship with their marketing channels in export markets. Whereas concepts such as power, conflicts, trust, commitment, and communication have been shown to be related to the economic success of interfirm cooperation in general and buyer–seller relations in particular, the need for a comprehensive model is often expressed in the literature.

Methodology/approach: The authors combine commitment-trust theory with resource-based and knowledge-based view perspectives to develop a new comprehensive conceptual model of firms’ relationship with their marketing channels in export markets. Data from 104 strategic business units in Israel was used to test the model empirically.

Findings: Notably, the model tested explained a higher percentage of the variance in performance. The findings suggest that noncoercive power enhances relationship quality (i.e., communication, trust, and commitment), which in turn improve cooperation and export performance. Conflict had a negative effect on relationship quality. In addition, cooperative conflict management strategies had a positive moderating effect on the conflict— relationship quality link, whereas competitive conflict management strategies had a negative moderating effect on the impact of conflict on relationship quality. Finally, the results suggest that there are strong positive relations between communication and trust and between trust and commitment.

Research implications: The research develops and tests empirically a conceptual comprehensive model of firms’ relationship with their marketing channels in export markets by including major performance drivers. The model incorporates conflict management strategies and combines commitment-trust theory with resource-based view (RBV) and knowledge-based view (KBV), an innovative combination with great explanatory potential. Based on the findings, there is sufficient support for using the suggested model as a new integrative behavioral model that explains channel relationships.

Practical implications: The results indicate that managers should use noncoercive power and cooperative conflict management strategies in order to positively affect relationship quality (i.e., communication, trust, and commitment), which in turn enhances cooperation and export performance.

Originality/value/contribution: The suggested research model presents a novel combination of existing relationship marketing (RM) knowledge with the limited IRM knowledge into a comprehensive IRM model. It includes new relationships beyond those studied before. Integrating and synthesizing results from a large body of conceptual and empirical literature led to the final model. Accordingly, it contributes elements of newness. First, the model includes major antecedents of performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive model of firms’ relationship with their international marketing channels in export markets. Second, there are almost no studies investigating conflict management strategies neither in RM nor in IRM models. Accordingly, a contribution of this research is incorporating conflict management strategies within the model and analyzing their effects.     

Entrepreneurial passion diversity in new venture teams: An empirical examination of short- and long-term performance implications

Empirical evidence is mounting that passion is an important part of entrepreneurship, contributing to behavior and outcomes for entrepreneurs, employees, and ventures. Yet knowledge of the performance implications of passion within new venture teams is sorely lacking. We examine how both the average level of entrepreneurial passion and the diversity of passion within new venture teams contributes to venture performance in both the short- and long-term. We test our model with multi-source, multi-wave data collected from 107 new venture teams participating in an accelerator program. Our findings indicate that average team passion is not significantly related to performance, but passion diversity, particularly intensity separation, is negatively related to performance. These findings have important implications for the literature on passion, new venture teams, and group affective diversity.Executive summaryWhile existing studies have substantially improved our understanding of entrepreneurial passion, its sources, and its subsequent impact, insight into this topic remains limited in at least three ways. First, most new ventures are founded and led by teams rather than individuals, yet existing studies predominantly focus on entrepreneurial passion at the individual rather than team level. Second, while there is a prevailing assumption in existing literature that entrepreneurial passion leads to beneficial outcomes consistent with longstanding work in psychology, there is emerging evidence in entrepreneurship that passion may not always be functional and that it can even be dysfunctional. Despite this, we have limited understanding of what types of passion or when or for whom it is dysfunctional. And third, extant work on entrepreneurial passion for individuals and within teams has focused on behavioral or self-report measures of performance (e.g. Cardon and Kirk, 2015; Santos & Cardon, 2019) as well as venture survival, rather than objective team or firm performance in the short- and long-term.In this paper, we study the influence of team passion on new venture team performance. We draw on theory concerning entrepreneurial passion within venture teams (Cardon et al., 2017) that suggests that different aspects of entrepreneurial passion within teams shape team dynamics and venture outcomes. While generally, theories of passion suggest that entrepreneurial passion is positively related to team outcomes due to the positive emotions it brings about, we find that in teams, the relationships are more complex. While the average level of passion among team members is positively related to team performance when considered alone, this effect is not significant when passion diversity is also considered. Diversity of passion among individual team members has a negative relationship with team performance, including diversity in the level of passion team members experience (intensity separation), as well as diversity in the object of their passion (focus variety). These negatively affect team dynamics due to conflicting emotions and identities among team members associated with passion diversity. We examine these relationships on specific team performance outcomes including evaluation of the business idea in the short-term and venture performance five years after their participation in an accelerator.The sample used in this study includes 107 entrepreneurial teams that were part of an accelerator program in the Netherlands. Teams were evaluated on the quality of their business ideas at the end of the accelerator program and the amount of investment the team had received five years later. Our results provide no support for positive effects of average team passion on the quality of the business ideas and confirm the negative effects of passion intensity separation on the quality of the business idea and the negative effects of passion focus variety on later venture performance.This paper makes several contributions. First, we expand the literature on passion in entrepreneurship, specifically adding to our understanding of passion within new venture teams. More specifically, we contribute to the growing body of evidence concerning potential dysfunctions of passion by uncovering a dysfunctional property of team passion diversity that uniquely manifests itself at the team level of analysis. We contribute to the literature on new venture teams by examining team composition in the form of passion diversity, and its relationship with team performance. Finally, our study extends work on the effects of entrepreneurial passion by looking at objective team performance outcomes in both the short- and long-term.For entrepreneurs, our findings confirm the importance of affect and identity for new venture teams, and specifically our findings indicate that there is a dark side to team passion. While passion is generally positioned as a positive phenomenon, we highlight the negative outcomes that passion can have in the team context. Diversity in the amount of passion team members experience can diminish the quality of the business ideas the team is able to generate in the short-term, while diversity in the focus of team members' passion can diminish the firm's long-term performance. For investors and accelerator communities this research validates the importance of considering entrepreneurial team composition and specifically entrepreneurial passion levels and domains when investing in teams or when supporting venture building.     

CEO Entrepreneurial Leadership and Performance Outcomes of Top Management Teams in Entrepreneurial Ventures: The Mediating Effects of Psychological Safety

This study examines whether the exhibition of entrepreneurial leadership by CEOs within entrepreneurial ventures fosters higher levels of top management team performance and job performance of team members, and whether psychological safety explains such effects. Utilizing four waves of multisource, multilevel data from 262 team members across 56 top management teams, we find that the exercise of entrepreneurial leadership by the CEO leads to higher levels of performance at the team and individual levels, and that psychological safety mediates such relationships.