Collaboration within and between teams in multi-team R&D projects

Large-scale R&D projects are often carried out employing a number of teams working simultaneously on separate sub-tasks. Such R&D projects constitute highly interrelated team-based organizations, where the complexity of the task and the time constraint of the project make collaboration on various levels of the organization a crucial prerequisite for success. While collaboration within teams (teamwork) has been theoretically and empirically investigated both in Europe and the US, the integration of multiple teams within an R&D project, however, has received little attention in management research. Two main questions seem of particular importance in this regard: how can we conceptualize and measure the quality of collaboration within and between teams? How strong is the relationship between collaboration on both levels (within and between teams) and the performance of individual teams in the project? This paper contributes to answering these questions by developing a theoretical concept of the quality of collaboration within and between teams. Using data from 191 personal interviews relating to all 39 simultaneous engineering teams of an automotive development project in Europe, we evaluate our concept of collaboration in team-based R&D organizations and test the relationships of these constructs with relevant measures of team performance (quality of outcome, adherence to budget, adherence to schedule). The findings indicate that measures of collaboration both within and between teams are positively related to the quality of the outcome (e.g., the quality of the part developed) and the adherence to schedules on the team level. The teams' adherence to budget is positively related only to the quality of integration as a measure of between-team collaboration. Important implications for management practice and research are discussed.