Content area
Full text
Introduction
As organizations increasingly rely on cross-functional sourcing teams to achieve superior purchasing performance, SCM research has begun addressing the procurement function’s interactions with internal functions, such as R & D, engineering, production, finance, and marketing (Driedonks et al., 2013; Stank et al., 2011). Cross-functional team members integrate diverse perspectives and competencies during decision making, but they can also bring different priorities and objectives to the supplier selection process (Driedonks et al., 2013; Schiele et al., 2011). Without aligned objectives, team members from the various functions involved in cross-functional collaboration may be slow in making decisions, reach decisions not in line with the overall business strategy, and thus achieve suboptimal results (Martin and Holweg, 2011; Nath and Sudharshan, 1994).
The strategic management literature discusses alignment issues using the notion of consensus and has unpacked the construct into the two elements: consensus on competitive methods and consensus on objectives (Dess, 1987; González-Benito et al., 2012; Kellermanns et al., 2011). Neither element refers to “ongoing group processes” (Kellermanns et al., 2011), but rather each denotes a status of alignment among team members, which is also referred to as the shared understanding of priorities (Kellermanns et al., 2005).
The topic of consensus has been addressed in theoretical and empirical studies in the past decades (González-Benito et al., 2012). This body of research has commonly focussed on the top management team as the locus of consensus (Knight et al., 1999). However, more recent research has extended the study of consensus to the functional level (Homburg et al., 1999), investigating consensus in sales teams (Ahearne et al., 2010), in operations settings (Boyer and McDermott, 1999; Joshi et al., 2003; Lindman et al., 2001), and in the internal supply chain (Pagell and Krause, 2002). However, the role of consensus in cross-functional sourcing team decision making remains unexplored, despite being an organizational reality in many firms and despite the difference in thought worlds and priorities of the functional team members involved in such decisions (Driedonks et al., 2013).
We address this gap by investigating consensus on the strategic objectives for a purchasing category (i.e. purchased item) by the cross-functional sourcing team members responsible for supplier selection in...