Innovate or die : how do product development teams adapt to environmental technological turbulence?

In this paper, we view work teams as open systems that need to directly address environmental challenges to survive. Drawing on the conceptual model of team adaptation, we propose that when facing environmental technological turbulence, new product development teams need to engage in two processes to be adaptive. One is to have low dependence on old team experts, and the other is to take the initiative immediately to address the challenges evoked by the technological turbulence. We collected multi-source, multi-wave data from 111 new product development teams in 10 companies operating in technology-intensive industries. The findings provide considerable support for our central hypotheses that these two processes mediated the relationship between team awareness of technological turbulence and team innovative performance. Moreover, we found that team autonomy heightened both the negative relationship between team awareness of technological turbulence and team dependence on old experts, and the positive relationship between team awareness of technological turbulence and team initiative taking. We discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of our findings in the context of how work teamsadapt toand reap the innovative benefits from environmental technological turbulence.