The Effects of Affective Trust and Suspicion in New Product Development Projects

Relationships between functional specialists working on NPD projects can lack trust, resulting in poor communication, low levels of co-operation, and, in the extreme, the political sabotage of projects. We empirically test a hypothesized model of managerial perceptions of motives and intentions, negative project politics, and affect-based trust, as well as their effect on dysfunctional conflict and defensive behaviors, with their subsequent effect on collaboration and NPD project success. Data were from 184 projects from the technically trained manager perspective, and 145 projects were from the marketing manager perspective. We find that, despite all of the NPD process improvement and use of integration methods, NPD managerial level interactions are still fundamentally relationally-based, where the strongest effects on cross-functional managerial behavior are from perceptions of negative motives, leading to defensive behaviors and politics interfering with collaboration and NPD success. On a positive note, while evident affect-based trust leads to collaboration and NPD success, it is far more important for technically trained managers. The implications for top management lie in structuring organizational processes that are trust-rich, in order to avoid the opportunity for distrust and suspicion to arise.