How Long and How Much: Stress, Adaptation, and NPD Team Performance

Extensive attention has been given to the effects of individual stress on employee work performance in both psychology and business literature. Recent work stress research has been shifting focus to team processes and performance. Nevertheless, several questions have not yet been fully addressed: (1) how does team stress impact new product development (NPD) team performance? (2) does stress chronicity, the persistency of NPD teams’ stress experience, change the effects of work stress? (3) what team processes can explain the underlying relationship between team stress and NPD team performance? (4) how do slack resources affect the NPD process and performance? By integrating the cognitive activation theory of stress (CATS) and the challenge-hindrance stressor framework (CHSF), this study attempts to investigate challenge stress intensity and hindrance stress intensity as important antecedents of NPD team performance with the team adaptation temporal framework as the explanatory mechanism, and how stress chronicity affects their effects. Based on the data from 112 Chinese NPD teams (i.e. 112 team leaders and 242 team members), results revealed that although challenge stress intensity promotes team performance by boosting both team improvised adaptation and team preemptive adaptation, high stress chronicity attenuates the positive effects of challenge stress intensity. Hindrance stress intensity, on the contrary, has negative associations with team adaptations and team performance. As stress chronicity increases, these associations are weakened. Moreover, slack financial resources are found to have both adaptive and maladaptive characteristics, namely, a high level of slack resources weakens the positive association between team improvised adaptation and NPD team performance but strengthens the positive association between team preemptive adaptation and NPD team performance. This study contributes to theory by capturing the role time plays in the stress-performance relationship and contribute to practice by giving important recommendations regarding stress management and resource allocation.