Purchasing and supply management's identity: Crisis? What crisis?

Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) has been subjected to a number of examinations, all concluding that PSM is not an academic discipline as it lacks its own theories and common themes of research. It is perceived by many as an applied social science and field of research applying theories from other disciplines. But, to date, these examinations have not revealed more definitively what PSM is, i.e., its identity. This Notes and Debates paper was stimulated by two focused meetings, a question panel at IPSERA 2019 and solicited views from IPSERA participants. These were synthesized and developed through grounding them in identity and social identity theories. They are provided to stimulate the debate on PSM's internal and external identity coherence and legitimacy.     

How Offshore Professionals' Job Dissatisfaction Can Promote Further Offshoring: Organizational Outcomes of Job Crafting

This paper investigates the process that leads from job dissatisfaction to new business opportunities in organizations that offshore R&D activities to emerging countries. Specifically, we investigate a major source of job dissatisfaction for offshore professionals: the misalignment between the work that they perform and their professional identity. Our findings indicate that offshore professionals react against the perception of a threat to work‐identity integrity through individual and collective job crafting. A significant outcome of job crafting is the introduction of new markets, industries, and services, which in turn may change a professional's job design. The perceptions of the compatibility of organizational identity with professional identity and with new idea recognition on the one hand, and of distant and local social support on the other, act as intervening conditions in the process. We discuss theoretical contributions to the evolution of offshoring, job crafting, and the interplay between organizational and professional identity, together with managerial implications.     

Larger,counter-intuitive and lasting – The PSM role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic,exploring opportunities for theoretical and actionable advances

PSM has played an important role in the initial mitigation of risks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore the nature and scope of this role and develop a roadmap for PSM contributions towards greater supply chain resilience. We find that the role of PSM is (1) multidimensional; responding to supply risks but also to demand and logistics risks, (2) counter to game theory; collaboration increased instead of decrease, (3) multi-stage; beyond the initial response the hardest change efforts are still ahead. The pandemic is accelerating the journey towards future-proof PSM but not necessarily revolutionizing the future of PSM.     

Exploring the identity and reputation of departmental groups: whose opinions matter most to their members?

This article focuses on perceptions of a collective's contribution identity (i.e. how its own members view the effectiveness of its contributions towards organisational goals) and contribution reputation (i.e. how the rest of an organisation views its contributions), and how they are associated with the job satisfaction of its members. Data from 187 employees across 10 organisational departments was used to test competing hypotheses developed from three different theoretical perspectives. Results suggest that satisfaction was positively linked to member beliefs about their department's contributions to organisational success. Reputation had a positive impact on satisfaction only when it is derived from individuals from other departments that a department interacted frequently with.     

Exploring the antecedents of municipal managers’ attitudes towards citizen participation

Meaningful and representative citizen participation depends greatly on administrators’ attitudes. This study examines antecedents of municipal managers’ attitudes towards citizen participation based on their perceptions of its likely contributions and costs. Using data from two American states – New Jersey and Pennsylvania – the research found that a manager’s professional identity and knowledge of successful peer group practices involving citizens influenced both perceptions. In addition, the research found that institutional factors such as red tape and city council diversity influenced a manager’s perceptions about the cost of citizen involvement. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Advancing purchasing as a design science: Publication guidelines to shift towards more relevant purchasing research

Due to rapidly changing business environments, purchasing and supply management (PSM) organisations are constantly confronted with new problems impacting organisational performance. PSM research can address these problems through design science research. Design science is also regarded as the science of the artificial. Design science research is a methodology that aims to systematically generate knowledge for the design, synthesis, testing, and evaluation of human-made artefacts (e.g., tools, interventions, policies) that solve practical problems. PSM artefacts such as the purchasing portfolio matrix invented by Kraljic (1983) represent a valuable opportunity to solve problems in the PSM discipline. However, our artificial-intelligence (AI)-based analysis of the discipline's flagship journal, the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management (JPSM), indicates that design-oriented publications in PSM are underrepresented, accounting for less than 4% of the total publications. We argue that existing PSM research should be complemented with more design-oriented research, and address the following research question: How can PSM scholars publish more design-oriented research? Our objectives are to (1) provide arguments for advancing PSM as a design science, (2) nurture a better understanding of design science research as a methodology, and (3) propose publication guidelines that enable researchers to present design-oriented research in a management journal.     

Social desirability bias in PSM surveys and behavioral experiments: Considerations for design development and data collection

Social desirability issues are long known, but not long gone. Across major purchasing and supply management (PSM) research streams, surprisingly few empirical studies explicitly address social desirability bias (SDB), despite SDB constituting a potentially limiting factor. With regard to surveys and behavioral experiments as two of the most widely used empirical methods in PSM, SDB can represent a critical issue. A first step should therefore be to collect and fully report data on SDB in all such studies. The present note then continues by providing an overview of methodological considerations for PSM researchers to mitigate social desirability issues before they arise in their surveys and behavioral experiments. We describe eight potential mitigation approaches, namely disguising the study's research purpose, assuring anonymity and confidentiality, indirect questioning, adapting the wording of single items, broadening response modes, conducting preparatory cognitive interviews, using multiple sources, and applying multiple research methods. In describing this repertoire of preventive measures, we point authors and review teams to both the broader methodological literature and PSM studies that have used such approaches.     

Reassessing measures of sustainable firm performance: A consultant's guide to identifying hidden costs in corporate disclosures

Strategy, management, corporate social responsibility, critical accounting, and other business researchers frequently utilize financial metrics such as return on assets, return on equity, and return on sales as proxy measures for the financial performance of firms. Large data sets offer convenience but exclude the textual data of corporate disclosures that offers critical insight into specific executive actions and social and environmental outcomes. This study looks at the detrimental consequences of the prevalent practice of relying on macrofinancial metrics as measures of firm performance. Insight from the socioeconomic approach to management (SEAM) is then applied to help an external analyst develop the perspective of an internal consultant to identify hidden costs in corporate disclosures. An extensive case on former CEO Robert Nardelli's tenure at Home Depot is presented as an example of applied SEAM theory to explore how a causal network of dysfunctions can be traced through publicly available financial disclosures. The management discussion and analysis as well as the executive incentive compensation formulas serve as a roadmap to discover hidden costs. The study offers a critical perspective of financial disclosures to allow researchers to externally diagnose dysfunctions sooner rather than years later, an insight formerly only available to internal consultants.     

Supply's strategic contribution: An empirical reality

Since the mid-1970s, authors from academia and from business have recognized that the strategic contribution made by supply is multi-faceted, although their work does not distinguish among the levels of strategic contribution. This study makes this differentiation by using a systematic literature review of the last 30 years and by performing a content analysis of 131 selected articles. The analysis of the increasing sophistication of supply's strategic contributions leads to three main observations: 1) the different types of contributions can indeed be classified into categories: category I (support to corporate improvement targets), category II (support to the organizational competitive advantage), and category III (source of sustainable competitive advantage); 2) contribution types in category I have been recognized since at least the early 1980s, while recognition has progressively taken place mostly in the 1990s for categories II and III; and 3) the contribution types in category I are perceived both as contributions that the supply function must master before it can take on those in categories II and III, and as contributions expected even when the supply function already contributes well to categories II and III. Therefore, supply professionals should develop their ability to better utilize the currently acknowledged strategic contributions, while being ready to take advantage of the new types of contributions.     

Four Lessons Learned in How to Use Human Resource Analytics to Improve the Effectiveness of Leadership Development

The tools and methodologies being developed in the emerging field of human resource analytics can be used both to measure the impact of your organization's investment in leadership development and, perhaps more importantly, to improve the return on that investment. In particular, analytics can be used to move your organization beyond one‐size‐fits‐all competencies by identifying the unique leadership competencies that drive your organization's business results (sales, profits, and employee turnover). Your employee “engagement survey” is a powerful, but typically underutilized, tool for doing so. By linking it with other, disparate pieces of data (180/360 assessments, Learning Management System (LMS) records, turnover, and financial data), you create the foundation for understanding where leadership competencies explain variation (positive and negative) in your organization's business results. This, in turn, creates a strong evidence base for optimizing your leadership development strategy—and is done so using metrics and analysis, which is the language of CEOs and CFOs.     

Critical success criteria for B2B E-commerce systems in Chinese medical supply chain

The paper presents an exploratory investigation to determine and prioritise the critical success criteria, which can measure and guide the successful application and performance improvement of business to business e-commerce system (BBECS) in a medical supply chain's selling and buying functions, in the context of global business expansion. The research reveals that the buying and the selling functions have different prioritisations on the majority of the determined critical success measuring criteria. These criteria are categorised into three Critical Success Measuring Criteria Groups, for the selling and the buying functions, respectively, guiding medical supply chain members in harnessing the full advantage of a BBECS. For the selling function, the top critical success measuring criteria are as follows: integrating information searching/transmission and application processes, ensuring the reliability and timeliness of technical support, ensuring recognition and acceptance of e-commerce processes, displaying the organisation's business focus and product/service provisions online, securing a large scale/amount of business transactions, adjusting production outputs and inventory levels and having more registered users than competitors do. The top critical success measuring criteria for the buying function are as follows: securing the establishment of business relationships between businesses, displaying the measures ensuring mutual trust and cooperation online, ensuring employees' recognition of the benefit of e-commerce in increasing revenue, ensuring the contribution to the development and realisation of corporate strategy, achieving cost reduction for the organisation, making the purchase of famous brand products available/doable, securing a large scale/amount of business transactions, and ensuring the attainability of products/services at a lower price.     

Is There Any Ethical and Moral Consideration in the Theory and Practice of Global Business Social Darwinism?

Abstract

This article has revisited the interchangeable meanings of morality and ethics in today's global business practices. This article argues that in the theory and practice of the global business Social Darwinism, there is no room for ethics and morality because the competitive international business ideology promotes the “survival of the fittest.” Furthermore, the purpose of this article is to first define the distinction between morality and ethics and their application in the real world of today's business; second, to analyze the ideological foundation of the international business practices of Social Darwinism in relation to global production, consumption, profitability, and efficacy.     

How to train supply managers – Necessary and sufficient purchasing skills leading to success

The success of purchasing and supply management (PSM) largely depends on PSM professionals' skills levels. Past research assumed that one universal PSM professional type exists, and they have proposed one-size-fits-all PSM skillsets. However, PSM professionals have different objectives. Based on the data of an extensive survey conducted amongst European PSM professionals (n = 366), this study presents skillsets for seven objectives (reducing costs and improving delivery, quality, sustainability, strategic competitive advantage, supplier satisfaction and innovation). A differentiation is made between “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions for each objective's effectiveness. Within a new PSM-skills taxonomy, a hierarchy of skills is detected as one of the first categories that provide quantitative evidence that soft skills or personal skills are necessary conditions for carrying out hard skills or professional skills. Based on the proposed skillsets, university educators and firm trainers can draft teaching plans that support the intended outcome, while individual PSM professionals may get an orientation on how to develop their skills further.     

Customer perception and competitive quality strategy

The objective of this paper is to determine the optimum level of quality a firm should choose in a product/service, given the customers‘ perceptions of quality and the reference standard in a competitive market. Our work on this quality selection problem differs from those of past researchers in that we model explicitly customer's perceptions and the reference standard. We develop a game-theoretic model to obtain insights into the firms’ quality selection problem. The model results suggest that the market differentially provides rewards or penalties to firms depending upon customers' perceptions as well as other market and product-specific parameters. We contrast our findings for an oligopolist with that for a monopolist and observe that although an oligopolist often provides a better quality product, he does not do so always; especially when perceptions are sufficiently weak and the reference standard is endogenous.     

Future business and the role of purchasing and supply management: Opportunities for ‘business-not-as-usual’ PSM research

The raison d'être for this article is simple: traditional ways of researching, theorizing, and practicing purchasing and supply management (PSM) are no longer sufficient to ‘meet the moment’. Scholars need to advance a “business-not-as-usual” footing approach to their work, if they are to make a meaningful contribution to addressing the current and future emergencies, as highlighted by recent extreme weather and the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, what can this, or should this, mean for a field rooted in traditional business thinking? This article builds on the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management's (JPSM) 25th Anniversary Special Issue editorial (2019); members of the JPSM's editorial team advance their unique perspectives on what “business-not-as-usual” means for PSM. Specifically, we advocate both thinking much more widely, in scope and ambition, than we currently do, and simultaneously building our ability to comprehend supply chains in a more nuanced and granular way. We explore whether the bias toward positivist work has omitted potentially interesting findings, and viewpoints. This leads to a call to re-think how we approach our work: should the key criteria always be to focus on theory development or testing? Should academics “think bigger”? Turning to specific research themes, illustrations of how our current thinking can be challenged or broadened by addressing the circular economy, and role of purchasing and innovation. Specifically, the focus on the PSM function as an intrapreneur within the larger organization, and the role of innovation and technology in PSM work. Taken together, we hope the ideas and arguments presented here will inform and inspire ambitious and novel approaches to PSM research with significant and enduring impact on the transformation of business.     

Metrics: HRM's Holy Grail? A New Zealand case study

What gets measured in business is noticed and acted on. The importance of human resource management (HRM) to be noticed as a vital key to business success has been argued profusely by the HRM profession over the last three decades. While the importance of human resource (HR) measurement is not disputed by business managers, the search for meaningful generic HR metrics is like HRM's Holy Grail. The purpose of this research is to investigate the issues confronting a sample of business organisations concerning measurement issues. It examines the current measurement practices used and their HR measurement needs. Developing appropriate HR measures, in terms of adding value, allows organisations to refocus their resources for leverage. Inappropriate measures simply encourage inappropriate behaviours not in the long‐term interests of the business. We know that HRM is less prepared than other business functions (like finance or management information systems) to quantify its impact on business performance. Our results suggest that HR metrics as the Holy Grail of HRM remain elusive. This research signals the importance of developing relevant and meaningful HR measurement models, while acknowledging that the actual metrics used (unlike accounting measures) may vary from business to business.     

Do social media enhance constructive employee voice all of the time or just some of the time?

Social media are becoming widely adopted by organisations to encourage collaboration and communication. We seek to understand how social media can enhance employee voice and employees' willingness to engage in constructive dialogue with both colleagues and managers. By drawing on literature on employee voice, signalling theory and personal control to analyse qualitative data from research into three strategic business units in a major global telecommunications corporation, we find that (a) employee perceptions of personal control and autonomy influence whether and how employees' exercise voice through social media, and (b) these perceptions vary according to different organisational/field‐level contexts evident in the corporation.     

Making sense of the impact of the internet of things on Purchasing and Supply Management:A tension perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming how industries operate. It impacts on firms’ supply networks, business processes and business models. This article describes how the IoT influences the Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) function. Our findings based on interviews and workshop with more than 200 senior European purchasing managers from large corporations suggest that PSM has opportunities to support the development of IoT solutions within firms which are required to work with dynamic and complex markets. At the same time, the IoT supports the development of a more capable and efficient PSM organisation. As part of this early stage theory building effort, we outline scenarios for the future of the PSM function. This leads us to reflect on how PSM leaders manage IoT-related tensions by means of differentiation and integration tactics.     

A maturity framework for autonomous solutions in manufacturing firms: The interplay of technology,ecosystem, and business model

Significant advancements within the fields of digitalization, electrification, and automation have enabled the development, testing, and implementation of increasingly advanced autonomous solutions. Current examples of industrial automation promise significant economic and sustainability-oriented benefits for industrial customers. Yet, implemented autonomous solutions have rarely advanced beyond ‘islands of autonomy’. Although enabling initial improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of operations, they have not led to the systemic process improvements that fully integrated site-wide solutions can achieve. It is becoming increasingly clear that the major challenges in this shift extend beyond technology to focus on business transformation and ecosystem relationships. Yet, extant research offers few insights into these domains. There is a need to develop a business-focused maturity framework for autonomous solutions to contribute to a predominantly technical discourse and support equipment actors and their wider ecosystems in commercializing autonomous solutions. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how industrial equipment manufacturers can align the development of technology, business models and ecosystem relationships for the advancement of autonomous solutions. We build on case studies that include 32 interviews from four industrial equipment manufacturers and their extended ecosystems of customers and partners. We capture our findings in a three-level maturity framework for industrial autonomous solutions. This framework unwraps the attributes of each level from the perspectives of technical system development, ecosystem configuration, and business model design and is complemented by three overarching principles for the successful commercialization of autonomous solutions.

     

Top and bottom line relevance of purchasing and supply management

Getting a substantial value addition out of investments in purchasing and supply management (PSM) is of central importance to senior management. However, the empirical evidence of a financial value contribution is fragmented. The current study addresses this fragmentation by using a comprehensive performance measurement model to validate empirically (a) whether PSM contributes to the company's financial success and (b) whether the financial value contribution is mediated by benefits of three operational performances (cost, quality, and innovation performance). Our findings from an international survey of 306 major companies from eight industry sectors suggest that an advanced, comprehensive implementation of PSM activities contributes to an improvement in PSM outcomes, which in turn mediates company success.