AUTHOR=Park Jin Suk , Suzuki Satoko TITLE=Product Creativity as an Identity Issue: Through the Eyes of New Product Development Team Members JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=12 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.646766 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.646766 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

In this study, we introduce a concept of product identification that denotes the overlap between identities of a new product and its developer. As creativity is the most important identity dimension in the new product, we draw on two dimensions of creativity: novelty and meaningfulness. According to the argument that novelty represents exploration, whereas meaningfulness represents exploitation, we hypothesize that product novelty is associated with an explorative behavior of new product team members, while product meaningfulness is associated with exploitative behavior. More importantly, product identification is proposed as the mechanism that explains the amplification effect of product identity on team members. Based on survey data collected from 200 Japanese new product development (NPD) team members, we conduct a statistical analysis to test the hypotheses. The findings demonstrate the alignment between the identity of a new product and the behaviors of the NPD members, which is amplified by product identification but not by organizational identification.