Trust in buyer-supplier new product development teams increases Advice-Seeking—But do birds of a feather flock together?

Abstract

We examine team dynamics in buyer-supplier new product development (NPD) projects over time, using McGrath's (1984) Input-Process-Output (IPO) model as our foundation. In this framework, a team member's trust in their NPD team and the team's composition function as inputs, while advice-seeking represents the process. To deepen our theorization and analysis, we integrate a social network perspective: trust-in-team is treated as an individual attribute, team composition—defined by organizational and functional similarity—is viewed through the lens of homophily, and advice-seeking is conceptualized as a network tie. We collected data from each member of three distinct NPD project teams at three key stages (NPD stage gates), ensuring a comprehensive analysis that spans both a focal buying organization and a strategic supplier. Using stochastic actor-oriented modeling (SAOM), we uncover an important yet often overlooked insight: changes in an individual team member's trust in their team lead to corresponding changes in advice-seeking behavior. However, team members continue to favor seeking advice from individuals within their own organization across each of the project stages. This tendency suggests that NPD team members may be missing valuable opportunities to seek advice from team members outside of their organization who could provide fresh perspectives and diverse expertise.