The management of the New Service Development (NSD) process remains a key research priority for service organizations. As a diverse mix of team members with different skills, perspectives and backgrounds participate in development teams and close collaboration is required among them, conflicts are likely to arise among team members. Different team members perceive conflict episodes in a different way and often embrace different conflict management behaviours and orientations (e.g. competing, avoiding) to deal with them. This study recognises NSD team as a complex system, through which individual members’ conflict management style choices enable team developmental dynamics, which sequentially lead to intragroup conflict resolution. Although a lot of work exists around the role of individual members’ conflict management styles, little research scrutiny is attracted on how teams solve intragroup conflicts and even limited empirical evidence is available regarding the linkages between individual and team factors can contribute to resolve intragroup conflicts. The present study taking under consideration the causal complexity, asymmetry and idiosyncratic nature of NSD conflict resolution, utilizes Complexity theory and leverages the advantages of fs/QCA in order to shed light on the NSD intragroup conflict resolution. Data was collected from employees in several service industries such as advertising, financial, insurance, consulting, IT services and telecommunications providers. The results confirm the major tenets of Complexity theory highlighting that any attempt to examine complex phenomena, such as NSD conflict resolution, as simple ones, based on symmetrical methodological approaches, may lead to simplistic and distorted explanations. In fact, the results demonstrate that there is not a ‘one fits all’ solution in order to solve NSD conflicts. Different facets for both the conflict-management styles and team dynamics act in various combinations in order to predict high scores in NSD conflict resolution.

Contact employees constitute an integral part of the consistent delivery of the firm’s brand promise on customers. Although internal brand management research stresses the importance of brand-supporting behaviours on behalf of contact employees during customer interface (Punjaisri et al., 2008), few attempts have been made to identify cognitive or affective routes through which organizations can enhance employees’ internalization of the firm’s brand values and eventually leverage their brand performance, (King and Grace, 2010). This study integrates the fit theory and the equity theory in order to address how the adoption of internal market orientation (IMO) can enhance employee brand performance within an interpersonal service setting through two different routes; by increasing their fit with different aspects of their environment and by enhancing their brand knowledge and brand identification levels. In this context, we examine whether IMO adoption promotes employee-organization fit (E-O fit), employee-supervisor fit (E-S fit) and employee-job fit (E-J fit), brand knowledge and brand identification and assess the joint impact of these variables on brand performance. This study extends present knowledge by illustrating the importance of IMO for several types of employees’ fit with their environment and by offering two different routes, a cognitive and an affective one, through which IMO adoption can promote brand performance. Third, the impact of several types of employees’ fit with their environment on brand performance is explored. To test the conceptual framework of our study we draw evidence from an interpersonal services context and particularly high-elaborate services, acknowledging that employees’ brand performance represents a significant part of customers’ evaluations of the brand within this context. This study delivers a holistic approach of brand performance within an interpersonal service context and clearly suggests two distinct but interrelated mechanisms through which contact employee brand performance can be leveraged. Our results further reveal two complementary routes through which service firms can also improve employees’ delivery of brand-consistent messages. Fostering employees’ fit with their working environment is a prerequisite before top management employs an internal branding strategy so as to reinforce contact staff to act in a brand-consistent way. Enhancing employees’ emotional attachment with the brand will promote their brand performance. Likewise, when acquiring knowledge about the brand and internalising the brand image before customer interactions, employees are expected to boost their brand performance. Although adopting an IMO has no direct influence on brand performance, IMO could strengthen the relationships the employees have with the brand and help them embrace the brand and internalize brand values; two key prerequisites for rendering contact employees as brand ambassadors.

This study provides a dynamic perspective of new service development (NSD) project management by exploring the joint impact of project manager’s behavioural orientation, internal team dynamics and knowledge management strategies on NSD resource optimization and decision-making quality. A hierarchical research design is adopted with evidence drawn from both NSD managers and participants from several service sectors. Results illustrate the importance of internal marketing philosophy, personalization and codification strategy, team climate, role ambiguity and conflict resolution for the specific NSD outcomes.