How Does Management Control Affect New Product Development Performance? A Research Methodology with OLS and fsQCA

High-quality development has become one of the important goals pursued by Chinese enterprises at present, and innovation is an important channel to realize high-quality development. Effective collaboration stands out as a pivotal element for the success of new product development (NPD). There are a variety of control mechanisms applied to mitigate uncertainty and foster cooperation. Despite the importance of these controls, the interplay between formal and informal management controls in NPD has been underexplored in prior research. The goal of this study is to validate the relationship between formal and informal control in a new product development scenario, responding to the debate about whether there is a substitution effect or a complementary effect between the two. This study addresses this gap by initially employing ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis to examine the role of each management control. Subsequently, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is employed to identify strategies for achieving high NPD performance in Chinese manufacturing enterprises. The results from the OLS analysis demonstrate that all forms of management control, especially trust, are effective in the improvement of NPD performance, while the results from fsQCA confirm that there is a complementary effect between formal and informal control, suggesting that informal control cannot function well without formal control. This research illuminates the synergistic dynamics of management controls within an open innovation context and emphasizes the importance of integrating both formal and informal controls to optimize NPD performance.