Clustering product development project organization based on trust and core teams

The new product development (PD) project is a complex network of communications involving trust relationships among teams. Trust is prominent, influencing the team positions and organizational performance indirectly. To manage the coordination complexity in PD projects, in this paper, we build a model of mutual trust among teams and further identify core teams to optimize the PD organizational network structure. First, we identified the technical interdependency and emotional closeness that influence the transmission behavior of the tie strength in the PD organizational network. Then, we examined how the presence of a common third party in the organizational network affects the trust transferability between interdependent teams. We modelled the structural similarity based on the trust transferability. To identify the core teams, which typically have high importance as well as diverse knowledge in the organizational network, we improved the LeaderRank centrality with trust transferability related to common recipients/sources to evaluate the importance of teams and present the team attributes (i.e. expertise) diversity. To build the group around core teams, we used the core teams as the input parameter (i.e. the initial clustering seeds) of the K-means clustering algorithms. The clustering results reinforce several managerial practices in an industrial example, including how trust transferability impacts the optimal organizational network structure and how to build an organizational network structure based on core teams.