MANAGING THE UNEXPECTED ACROSS SPACE: IMPROVISATION, DISPERSION AND PERFORMANCE IN NPD TEAMS

Organizations are increasingly moving toward a team-based structure for managing complex knowledge in NPD projects. Such teams operate in an environment characterized by dynamic project requirements and emergent non-routine issues which can undermine their ability to achieve project objectives. Team improvisation—a collective spontaneous and creative action for identifying novel solutions to emergent problems—has been identified as a key team-situated response to unexpected challenges to new product development (NPD) team effectiveness. Geographic dispersion is increasingly becoming a reality for NPD teams that find themselves needing to improvise solutions to emergent challenges, while attempting to leverage the knowledge of team members who are physically distributed across various locations. However, very little is known about how teams’ improvisational actions affect performance when such actions are executed in increasingly dispersed teams. To address this gap in the literature, this article draws on the emerging literature on different forms and degrees of team dispersion to understand how team improvisation affects team performance in such teams. In particular this article takes into account both the structural and psychological facets of dispersion by considering the physical distance between team members, the configuration of the team across different sites, as well as the team members’ perception of being distant from their teammates