Power and empowerment: the role of top management support and team empowerment in new product development

Although recent empirical research shows the value of empowerment and top management support (TMS) for new product development (NPD) efforts, it remains an open question as to whether empowerment and TMS are always beneficial for NPD performance. In a study of a large number of NPD projects we examined this question by (1) assessing the direct contributions of empowerment and TMS to speed and success in NPD, and (2) examining the potential moderating influence of uncertainty on the effects of empowerment and TMS. Our results indicated that empowerment is positively associated with NPD speed under all conditions of uncertainty, but is more highly correlated with overall project success when uncertainty is high than when it is low. TMS is positively associated with both NPD speed and success regardless of uncertainty, but we found some suggestions that sponsorship is less important for speed-to-market in more certain environments, particularly when NPD projects are routine incremental innovations. Our study also indicates technological uncertainty and market uncertainty have a different moderating impact on the relationship between team empowerment and NPD success. The implications of these findings for a contingency-oriented view of NPD practices are discussed.