The effects of a projectʹs social capital, leadership style, modularity, and diversification on new product development performance

Due to the rapid advances in information technology and the dynamic business environment, firms are facing more and more competitive challenges. To overcome this, many companies are trying to create new products to maintain their competitiveness. This study aims to explore the key success factors of New Product Development (NPD) performance from the perspectives of social capital, leadership, modularity and diversification of project team members. Therefore, the major research objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive research framework to integrate the effects of social capital, project leadership style, modularity, team member diversification, and NPD performance. Interviewing 500 senior leaders of NPD teams from different manufacturing firms in Taiwan, this study found that: (1) a higher level of participating and selling style of leaderships with a higher level of social capital generate better NPD performance, (2) a higher modularity level of a new product results in better NPD performance, and (3) team member diversification, however, does not have significant impacts on NPD performance. The managerial implications, limitations and future research directions of this work are also provided.