Decisions that matter: Unethical pressures and value-based procurement

The purchasing role has taken on an increasingly strategic presence within organizations over the past decades (Chen et al., 2004; Ellram and Carr, 1994; Paulraj et al., 2006), shifting attention from a primary focus on lowest price acquisition toward value-creating activities and total cost savings (Carr and Pearson, 1999; Carter and Jennings, 2004; Tong et al., 2018). As a result, procurement professionals now operate in more complex, strategically significant environments, which can lead to various behavioral and decision-making challenges. This dissertation examines the behavioral responses of procurement professionals to two central challenges encountered in this strategic context.

The first challenge concerns irresponsible procurement. Procurement professionals operate at the boundary between the internal buying organization and its external suppliers (Zhang et al., 2011). This boundary spanning role places them in situations where ethical dilemmas are likely to arise, as internal organizations and external suppliers often have conflicting objectives (Rossetti and Choi, 2008; Yang et al., 2022). In such situations, procurement professionals must not only judge what is ethical or unethical, but also act accordingly. The second challenge relates to decision-making approaches in sourcing. The shift from a tactical to a strategic procurement function requires procurement professionals to adopt value-based sourcing approaches. However, in practice, many continue to display a bias toward cost minimization (Choi et al., 2020), which can lead to suboptimal supplier selection decisions (Gray et al., 2020). In this dissertation, we use focus group interviews, surveys, and discrete choice experiments to empirically examine (1) the perception of and potential engagement in practices that may be seen as irresponsible, and (2) the persistent bias toward cost-focused decision-making at the expense of value considerations, both of which remain underexplored in the literature.