Emotional Expressions in Front‐End Team Work Hamper the Originality of New Product Ideas

ABSTRACT The originality of new product ideas in the front‐end is crucial for new product development (NPD) success. To foster originality, organisations use idea sprints, where distributed and remote NPD teams working in agile develop ideas under fixed time and cost constraints, exchanging outputs virtually. These virtual transfers, via tools like email, include both product‐related factors like idea descriptions and person‐related factors like emotions. Emotions expressed about idea descriptions can, however, be distorted during virtual transfers, possibly influencing idea elaboration. Despite their frequent occurrence and potential impact, this issue remains unexplored in the literature. Drawing on emotions as social information (EASI) theory, we test if the expression of excitement reduces, while the expression of frustration increases the originality of new product ideas generated in idea sprints. The results of an online experiment with professional participants in the role of either team member (i.e., idea generator or elaborator) or product owner (i.e., evaluator) during a simulated idea sprint unexpectedly show that both emotions, if expressed by the generator in the virtual transfer to the elaborator, reduce the originality of the new product ideas as evaluated by the product owner. These findings enrich our limited understanding of the role of expressed emotions in virtual transfers for ideation activities in the front‐end of NPD.