Taking Turns Leading? Rotational Leadership in New Product Development Projects With Supplier Involvement

ABSTRACT Despite the potential value of involving suppliers in buyers' new product development (NPD) projects, there are challenges in integrating distributed resources and actions across organizational boundaries. Insight from the intra ‐organizational leadership literature suggests that an effective inter ‐organizational leadership model could help address project‐level coordination challenges. Adopting an agency theory view complemented by role theory, this study examines the antecedents and outcomes of rotational leadership (i.e., shifting leadership roles in a process) in a buyer NPD project involving suppliers. The results indicate a U‐shaped relationship between rotational leadership and project performance by analyzing a paired sample of quantitative and qualitative data for 279 NPD projects. In a post hoc qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), this study triangulates quantitative results using interview data, showing that buyers adopt boundary buffering to address potential rotational leadership risks while achieving high project performance. Both buyer risk‐taking and supplier relationship‐specific investments contribute to the emergence of rotational leadership. These results enrich supplier involvement in the NPD literature by demonstrating (1) when rotational leadership emerges and (2) how it affects project performance. The findings also provide managerial implications for leadership role arrangements and boundary‐buffering decisions in the context of collaborative innovation in the supply chain.