Activity‐Specific Role Stress in Purchasing

INTRODUCTION The importance of the purchasing function to the bottom line of an organization has been well documented.[1] Besides its contribution to corporate profitability, responsibility for activities such as transportation, countertrade, and supplier quality management has migrated to this function.[2] Like most other organizational functions, purchasing is experiencing turbulent and rapidly changing environments in which its critical activities must be conducted.[3] Thus, purchasing decisions are currently being made under conditions of greater uncertainty than ever before. In addition, in many firms purchasing activities are being carried out by younger, less experienced buyers who, because of corporate downsizing and the integration of sophisticated information and communications systems, are expected to assume much more job responsibility. Today's purchasing professional is faced with having to competently carry out a wide variety of activities.[4] These activities range from value analysis to scrap and surplus disposal, as noted in Tables II and III. Some activities, such as the determination of when to buy, supplier management, and contract administration, form the nucleus of the purchasing activities, while others, like value analysis and price forecasting, are perceived to be peripheral to these core activities. However, previous research has found that even the peripheral purchasing activities enhance an employee's performance, motivation, and satisfaction.[5] This makes it important for researchers to consider a broad range of purchasing activities in their investigations. The large number of activities and the increasing complexity of purchased products make it necessary for purchasers to seek ongoing education and training. When these activities and the need for continual training are combined with the demands of just-in-time purchasing, total quality management, and "partnering," the end result is an environment in which the potential for experienced role stress is greater than ever. Past research has conceptualized role stress predominantly in terms of role ambiguity and role conflict. Stress emanates from role ambiguity, when an individual lacks needed information; role conflict occurs when a person receives and then must reconcile competing expectations. These stressors have been shown unequivocally to be associated with lower levels of job performance, less job satisfaction, and diminished organizational commitment across many different work settings. However, the vast majority of role stress research in purchasing has been conducted utilizing a holistic (global) perspective.[6] The implicit underlying assumption in these studies has been that the role stress experienced by the purchaser does not vary across job activities. Considering the nature of today's dynamic, boundary-spanning purchasing environment and the wide array of job functions the purchaser performs, it seems logical to question this assumption. To improve understanding of the purchasing work environment, this exploratory study investigates role stress from the perspective that purchasers may experience different levels of role stress when performing different job activities. The focal question of the study is, which activities or groups of activities within the purchasing function tend to contribute most to experienced role stress? This research seeks to extend the study of activity-specific stress begun by Jackson several years ago.[7] It also investigates the levels of role ambiguity and role conflict associated with different purchasing activities. Insights for purchasing professionals are offered by categorizing groups of job activities in terms of their differential levels of experienced role stress. BACKGROUND Purchasing and Role Stress Purchasing is an example of a classic organizational boundary-spanning function because many of its job activities require buyers to interact frequently with constituents from other departments and organizations. …