Project Members' Goal of Product Leadership

What it measures

Measures the extent to which members of an NPD project team personally believe that product leadership—being recognised as a superior product innovator—is a desirable and important goal for their organisation. Unlike the championing scale (COPLG), which captures senior management advocacy, this scale assesses the degree to which project members themselves have internalised the product leadership goal. Project members who hold this goal are more receptive to organisational messages about the importance of customer knowledge development and more motivated to persist with the process despite repeated failures. Items are administered with respect to a specific recent NPD project.

Response format

5-point Likert scale

Scale items

• The members of this project team understood that innovations in product and strategy are key to the firm's success.
• The members of this project team believed that the firm differentiates itself from competitors in the industry by being a superior innovator.
• The members of this project team were convinced that innovation is what this company is fundamentally about.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Construct reliability = .90. Item loadings: .83, .94, .85 (t range = 14.37–15.49, p < .01). Hypothesised as a moderator of championing→CKD (H6), but this moderation was not supported. Post hoc mediation analysis supported an alternative role: championing the organisational product leadership goal predicted project members' goal (β = .35, p < .01), and controlling for project members' goal rendered the direct championing→CKD path non-significant, indicating full mediation. This suggests that project members' goal internalisation is the mechanism through which senior management championing activates customer knowledge development.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Joshi, A. W., & Sharma, S. (2004). Customer knowledge development: Antecedents and impact on new product performance. Journal of Marketing, 68(4), 47–59.

Keywords