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Multifunctional teams have become commonplace in new product development (NPD) endeavors. Knowledge on the functioning of such teams, however, remains little. In this article two major principles about how these teams function are investigated, team cooperation and team integration. A theoretical discussion indicates that there is not a clear‐cut way to manage team cooperation and team integration in order to achieve high performance. The management of these principles in NPD teams is rather a delicate managerial challenge. These theoretical considerations are statistically examined then. The results show that both team cooperation and team integration are inversely U‐shaped related to NPD team performance. In managerial terms the results imply that creating the right level of team cooperation and team integration managers have to balance their actions between two extremes. The article finishes by presenting opportunities how to do so.

The purpose of this research is to focus on the role of trust in knowledge sharing. Social capital researchers have put forward trust as an important force behind the sharing of knowledge. This study aims to investigate whether trust indeed explains knowledge sharing relationships, or whether there are in fact much more important drivers of the sharing of knowledge in new product development projects.

A survey study was carried out in large new product development projects, including 23 teams and 91 individuals.

The main finding is that trust is a poor explanatory of knowledge sharing. Team membership, on the other hand, has the largest effect on the density of knowledge sharing relationships. Social capital thus does not reside in trust but in team membership, especially for longer‐lived teams.

There should be more attention for other aspects affecting knowledge sharing, including team characteristics.

This article will be of use to organizations conducting new product development, wishing to manage knowledge sharing as social capital. Moreover, this article provides more insight on the value of the trust in knowledge sharing and offers directions for future theory development.

The paper addresses the effect friendly and friendship relationships among members of innovation teams on the performance of the teams.

The members of innovation teams may develop friendly and friendship relationships over time. In our study, we focus on the effect of the frequency of such non‐work relationships on team performance. For this research, we collected full network data on non‐work relationships in a sample of 44 innovation teams and investigate how these “friendly and friendship networks” affect the performance of innovation teams.

As result turns out that the frequency of friendly ties has positive as well as negative consequences on team performance, whereas the frequency of friendship ties positively relates to the performance.

The results indicate the importance of informal relations for the performance of innovation teams. Further, it is shown that friendly and friendship relations have different theoretical and practical implications. Future research can overcome the limitations of the presented research by concentrating on larger sample sizes and longitudinal research designs.

Building on the results of the study managers can better orchestra innovation teams focussing not only on formal but also on informal contacts. The main practical implication is to strive for friendship contacts and to avoid too strong friendly contacts.

The study adds knowledge to the research on informal relationships and performance two‐fold. First, the findings testify that friendly and friendship contacts are different and not part of the same dimension, and there is strong evidence for the importance of informal contacts.