Sourcing team success : team studies in a purchasing and supply management context

Abstract

Sourcing teams have become an increasingly important form of organization in purchasing and supply management. Sourcing teams, also referred to as category or commodity teams, are assigned the task of finding, selecting, and managing suppliers for a category of products or services across businesses, functions and disciplines. Typically, sourcing teams are staffed by people from different business units, and with different functional backgrounds. Sourcing teams have a boundary-spanning role in dealing with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders. Despite high expectations, however, many companies find decreased levels of ambition on sourcing teams within months after start-up, as members’ motivation and cohesiveness flag. Yet there is little rigorous empirical research to provide managers with meaningful insights for increasing the chances of sourcing team success. Sourcing teams’ activities are conducted across functional and divisional borders, making them an exemplar for cross-functional, cross-business teams. Thus investigating sourcing teams contributes to literature by providing deeper insights into team processes and success, which can be applicable to other teams that share their multifunctional and cross-business characteristics. The central research question of this dissertation therefore is: How to improve sourcing team success? Three empirical studies in this dissertation address this overall question; each serves a different objective. The first study aims to identify the critical success factors for sourcing teams. The second study’s objective is to investigate team members’ and managers’ perspectives on cross-functional sourcing team composition and its contribution to team success. Finally, the third study focuses on the collaboration between team members and other stakeholders, and aims to integrate teams’ internal and external processes over time into a single model. The first two studies build on data from two cross-sectional surveys; the third study is a qualitative multiple case study.