Today, the competitive pressure of multi national companies has intensified. The rapid pace of technological innovations, combined with the opening of markets which has acclerated global competition, causing companies to review their R&D ability to survive.
In this point of view, the importance of R&D management has increased and every company tries to get good R&D performances.
This study concerned reader's roles and team characteristics for a high performing R&D team. The main objective of this study is to evaluate what is the key success factors and how these factors relate each other for a high performing R&D team.
In general, R&D team leader's 5 roles(strategic planner, team builder, expert, gatekeeper, and champion) and team characteristics(team member, task, climate) and R&D environmental elements(direct/indirect) play an important role to promote performance impacts and team effectiveness for R&D team.
This study investigated the key success factors that influenced for the team performances and also demonstrated that leader's roles, team characteristics, and environments have interrelation with each other. In order to acomplish high performing R&D team, it is good for the team to overlap these relational factors.
This case study is real projects that actually performed in a heavy industry company. Five cases were analyzed in different dimensions that consisted in environmental elements, team characteristics and leader's roles.
In conclusion, the high performing R&D team is heavily dependent upon the following findings:
- The major relational factors(environmental elements, team characteristics, leader's roles)have relations with performance impact and team effectiveness. If these factors could become sufficiently overlapping, it will be impedes for high performing R&D team.
- Espically successful projects have well-defined detail objectives, goal and process schedule in early.
- Among the leader's roles, strategic planner and team builder were very important. and it was also importand the business unit relations that was impacted champion's roles.
- The characteristics of successful taem have small member with complementary skills and good human relations.
- A strategic planner and a team builder are the basic roles of the R&D team reader's roles. That implaies the importance of initial goal setting and human relations.
The results clearly showed that above findings were not present in most cases, leading to marginally successful results. This paper will ofter additional insight to general teams how to accomplish a high performing team.
