Procurement’s Professional Identity and its Impact on Decisions

Abstract

We apply a social identity lens to the professional identity of procurement. We conduct semi-structured interviews with procurement professionals to gather information on how they define their professional identities, how they perceive others to understand their professional identities, their level of identification with the procurement profession, and their group’s status within the organization. We conduct an experiment to observe how group identification, group status and group image affect decision-making in a realistic cross-functional scenario. We find evidence that strong identification with the procurement function can cause an increased emphasis on costs and offer managerial recommendations to mitigate this effect. We find evidence that the public perception of procurement’s identity can also affect decision-making. We observe that many procurement professionals perceive their profession to be negatively stereotyped as cost-focused and transactional, and we promote the alternative group images used by our interview participants.