The Impact of Team Reflexivity and Stress on Unlearning and Innovation in New Product Development Te

The impact of team reflexivity and stress on unlearning and innovation in new product development teams

Lee and Sukoco (2011) examined the impact of team reflexivity and perceptions of stress on both levels of unlearning and product innovation within new product development teams in Taiwan. In their paper they define unlearning as: 'actively reviewing and breaking down the organization's long-held routines, assumptions and beliefs' (p. 412). The fundamental assumption they start with is that due to the rapidly changing technological environment that high technology companies have to deal with, the ability of new product development teams to reflect on and give up existing knowledge and beliefs (unlearning) is important to their innovativeness. Thus, one of the hypotheses that they test is that team unlearning is positively related to team innovation. They also examine the impact of two other variables on both unlearning and innovation. The first of these factors is team reflexivity.

Team reflexivity, the ability to critically reflect on taken-for-granted ideas and knowledge, is defined as: 'a team's collective efforts to review and raise awareness toward task-related issues during the development of new products' (p. 411). They argue that the more teams are able to be reflexive, the more they are likely to be willing to unlearn and abandon existing knowledge or behaviours, thus they hypothesize that team-level reflexivity will be positively related to both unlearning and product innovation. The second factor they examined was team stress, which is defined as the extent to which teams have a sense of crisis or anxiety. They argue that teams which experience high levels of stress are likely to fear receiving negative feedback, selectively focus on what is regarded as threatening information, and tend to interpret unclear information in a negative way.

They hypothesize that team stress will be positively linked to unlearning, but negatively linked to product innovation. To test their hypotheses they conducted a survey-based study of new product development teams that were located in three science parks in Taiwan. Survey responses were received from 298 people who were members of seventy-seven different new product development teams, with the majority of these teams working in high technology industries. All but one of their hypotheses were supported.

Thus, as hypothesized, they found that unlearning was positively related to levels of product innovation. The ability to unlearn was found to be positively related to the performance of new product development teams. Further, as hypothesized, they found that team reflexivity was positively related to both unlearning and product innovation. In terms of the stress hypotheses, they found that stress levels were negatively related to levels of product innovation, but that, in contrast to what they hypothesized, team stress was also found to be negatively related to levels of unlearning.

It appears that feelings of stress result in teams acting defensively, where they tend to rely upon what they perceive to have been traditionally successful beliefs and behaviours, which makes them less willing to embrace change. Thus, they found that unlearning was facilitated by the team's ability to be reflexive, but inhibited by the extent to which teams experienced feelings of stress.

From an organizational point of view, can you think of ways that the levels of stress experienced by people in new product development teams can be reduced, and levels of reflexivity be developed and enhanced?