مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله مدیریت خرید و تامین – Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management

Driven by competitive pressures, sourcing strategies constantly seek ways to satisfy customer demands and mitigate supply risk at lower costs (AT Kearney, 2011; Eltantawy and Giunipero, 2013). Developing such value-enhancing strategies is complex (Ellis et al., 2010; Wu and Pagell, 2011) and demands substantial creativity and innovative problem solving (Giunipero et al., 2005; O’Brien, 2012). According to a recent industry survey (State of Flux, 2013), nearly 70% of buying companies have installed sourcing teams to formulate and implement creative sourcing strategies and thereby attain superior business performance (Hardt et al., 2007). These teams pool the problem-solving capabilities and specialized knowledge of employees from different functional backgrounds (Englyst et al., 2008). For example, at Target, sourcing is a cross-functional process and a competitive differentiator in its retail environment (Forbes, 2015). By challenging product specifications or the underlying business need for a purchase, sourcing teams are able to creatively resolve problems (Giunipero et al., 2005), realize lower purchase prices (Johnson et al., 2002), and improve bottom-line results (AT Kearney, 2011).

However, it is also becoming clear that many sourcing teams fail to reach their full potential or meet general management expectations (Driedonks et al., 2014; Moses and Åhlström, 2008). In a recent market survey (Deloitte, 2014), more than half of participating Chief Procurement Officers (57%) believed their teams were incapable of delivering unique, effective solutions to current sourcing challenges. A major reason for this failure might be the widespread use of top-down instructions (i.e., formal sourcing processes, templates, and protocols), which are inadequate for guiding sourcing teams in formulating creative, value-enhancing strategies (Kaufmann et al., 2014; Monczka et al., 2010). For example, Englyst et al. (2008) criticize extant research for not providing concrete guidance on the specific processes that govern creative problem solving and effective team functioning. Understanding how an atmosphere conducive to creativity originates from the bottom up, within sourcing teams, instead may enable such teams to focus their attention directly on the processes needed to develop creative, value-enhancing sourcing strategies.

In our attempt to do so, we seek theoretical guidance from emerging team climate research. The concept of climate implies the shared perceptions of team members toward the policies, procedures, and practices that will be rewarded and supported in a specific work setting (Zohar and Tenne-Gazit, 2008). It thus provides a means to capture the collective sensemaking process by which individual team members derive information about relevant role behaviors that are expected of them, to attain strategically-focused outcomes as a team (Schneider et al., 1992). In sourcing teams, a current challenge is to rely less on formal sourcing protocols and deploy creativity as a relevant role behavior, instead. That is, sourcing teams appear to provide impactful means to attain breakthrough sourcing strategies (Pagell, 2004; Trent and Monczka, 1994). However, little research conceptualizes or measures how creative processes and behaviors unfold in these teams (Driedonks et al., 2010; Englyst et al., 2008; Moses and Åhlström , 2008). Within this study, we draw on work-unit climate research to address our central research question of how creative processes and behaviors unfold in sourcing teams. The purpose is to conceptualize the creativity climate in sourcing teams, develop a measurement instrument to assess the creativity climate in sourcing teams, and test its impact on sourcing team performance. With this approach, we contribute to extant literature in two important ways.