Midway to Social Embeddedness in NPD : The Role of Contextual Mechanisms

Researchers increasingly discuss social embeddedness's role in new product development success. Recent studies provide evidence of an inverted u-shape relationship between embeddedness and initiative performance, but fail to develop a theoretical understanding of how senior managers can establish new product development teams with beneficial intermediate levels of social embeddedness. On the basis of an inductive study of six new product development teams at a leading automotive manufacturer, we derive five dimensions of intra-organizational context mechanisms as managerial means to influence structural, positional, relational, and cognitive embeddedness. Further, we develop theoretical insights into how senior managers can establish new product development teams with intermediate levels of embeddedness by deploying some of these context mechanisms to strengthen embeddedness, while others are used as a counterbalance to avoid over-embeddedness.