Evaluation of Product Development Success: A Student Perspective

The time pressure on new product development under unpredictable conditions requires the renewal of the project management approach that suggests the prominent role of project managerial competencies in achieving project success. Project management education must be adjusted to understand students’ opinions in the field. The study uses a survey among Hungarian engineering, business, and IT higher education students. The analysis aims to explore opinions about the main barriers to successful product development projects, and the expected ways of regulating the project by ANOVA and principal component analysis. The responses of 126 students confirm the appreciation of management competencies. Gaps in team composition, inadequate communication, common changes in the plans, and the lack of experience in similar development tasks are considered to be the main contributors to product development project failures. Collaboration and competition with external partners were found to be less essential factors. Students believe that regulation of the work is necessary, but the project team should be trusted to establish it. Beyond developing the curricula, the experience of this study can promote the successful execution of collaborative projects between companies and higher education institutions. It can establish expected student competencies to quickly become effective project team members.

Competition within Cross-Functional Teams: A Structural Equation Model on Knowledge Hiding

The modern challenges of business success make the use of interdisciplinary cross-functional teamwork necessary to tackle social and economic issues alike. The study examines the role of knowledge hiding in within-team coopetition, taking into account its subsequent factors influencing team efficiency. For the investigation, a self-made model was applied that associates the personality of individuals, their role inside the organization and work-environmental aspects with the individual’s behavior as the antecedent of within-team competition. The objective of this study revolves around the question of which factors apply to the efficiency of cross-functional teams. The modern concept of interdisciplinary coopetition faces more difficulties than traditional teams regarding voluntary adoption in new environments. The model was empirically applied to a dataset of 129 participants working in cross-functional teams. Three hypotheses were drafted and statistically evaluated. The factor of knowledge hiding was evaluated as one of the crucial factors blocking the efficiency of team-based work, based on the results from the literature review. This was further fueled by antagonistic behavior and a competitive supervisor. The empirical findings further elaborate that individuals with a competitive supervisor tend to be more antagonistic and competitive themselves. Equally, a highly developed personality trait of antagonism correlates positively with knowledge hiding, thereby resulting in the limiting of team performance. Surprisingly, competitiveness among individuals is negatively correlated with knowledge hiding, indicating that different personality traits and different real-life situations react drastically differently towards competitive environments. The results close the research gap of a strategic necessity for supervisors and managers designing business organizations alike, namely, that an individually adapted and situationally aware leadership is indispensable for a successful cross-functional team approach, even more than in traditional team compositions. As for now, only the effects on personality in educational environments were discussed in previous research.