When teamwork really matters: task innovativeness as a moderator of the teamwork-performance relationship in software development projects

The study of cross-functional teams remains popular given the use of teams to integrate cross-functional expertise to achieve higher performance in innovative projects. A related stream of research shows that teams are associated with higher performance only in cases of highly innovative projects. Such research is based on the assumption that organizations can freely choose integration mechanisms on a project-by-project basis. However, this assumption is flawed in cases where organizations, such as software development laboratories, commit to a team-based organizational design on a more permanent basis. With software development teams working on projects with varying degrees of innovativeness, we investigate the effects of Hoegl and Gemuenden's (2001) measure of teamwork quality on the performance of teams with moderately and highly innovative projects. Using data from 575 members, leaders, and managers of 145 software development projects, results show that teamwork quality is associated with team efficiency (i.e., adherence to schedule and budget) only in projects posing high task innovativeness. The relationship between teamwork quality and team effectiveness (i.e., quality of outcome), however, is not moderated by task innovativeness. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.