Goals, Conflict, Politics, and Performance of Cross‐Functional Sourcing Teams—Results from a Social Team Experiment

• Author: Henrik Franke,Kai Foerstl
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jbl.12225
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020

Goals, Conflict, Politics, and Performance of Cross-Functional

Sourcing Teams—Results from a Social Team Experiment

Henrik Franke and Kai Foerstl

German Graduate School of Management and Law (GGS)

Strategic sourcing is carried out in cross-functional teams to account for the complexity and multidimensionality of modern procurement

decisions. However, such teams not only enable the integration of distinct interdependent skill sets and viewpoints, they are also character-

ized by functional goal misalignment. We focus on the resulting behavioral challenges, namely conflict and politics, and their effects on team

satisfaction and rationality, which ultimately leads to observed outcomes. We test our hypotheses in a structural equation model based on data

gathered from 468 participants in a social team experiment. We find a mediated effect of goal misalignment on political behavior via two types

of team conflict. Political behavior, in turn, obstructs rational team sourcing decisions and reduces team members’satisfaction with the process.

Our study indicates that behavioral challenges in the framework of Organizational Buying Behavior not only co-occur but affect each other via

mediation. Hence, managers need to closely monitor the escalation chains’origin, task conflict, which constitutes a necessary condition for fur-

ther emotional dissent and political biasing. We contribute to the understanding of the challenges in cross-functional sourcing teams, thereby

providing advice to executives in their pursuit to rationalize and improve sourcing team decisions and their outcomes.

Keywords: Global sourcing; Team decision-making; Experimental design; Organizational Buying Behavior

INTRODUCTION

As a result of the outsourcing waves of recent decades, organiza-

tional buying has become an integral element of firms’strategies

and operations (Carter and Narasimhan 1996; Trent and Mon-

czka 2003). At the same time, deciding where to buy from has

become more and more complex (Riedl et al. 2013). In order to

make effective buying (or sourcing) decisions, various functions,

such as purchasing, R&D, and marketing, have to align and inte-

grate (Trent and Monczka 1994; Mentzer et al. 2008). Thus,

members of sourcing teams typically possess unique, nonredun-

dant skills, which create interdependence in supply chain man-

agement (SCM) decision-making processes, requiring functional

representatives to exchange and jointly process information to

leverage their combined expertise (Thompson 1967; Moses and



Ahlstr€

om 2008).

It is well established that cross-functional integration con-

tributes to firm performance and supply chain effectiveness

(Flynn et al. 2010), yet diverse sourcing teams also face chal-

lenges from functional misalignment and conflicting motives that

potentially interfere with rational decision-making processes

(Moses and



Ahlstr€

om 2008; Kaufmann et al. 2012). Thus, cross-

functional sourcing teams face a coopetition situation where

cooperation is required (i.e., from executives), but functional

managers still compete for influence in political fights (Rajala

and Tidstr€

om 2017). For instance, technical functions politically

defend their interests by cropping available supply options to

R&D’s preferred supplier via the design of sourcing requirements

(Stanczyk et al. 2015). In a prestudy with a German multina-

tional automotive supplier, a top-level supply chain manager sta-

ted that, while the trade-offs between costs and technical

capabilities can theoretically be resolved throughout the decision-

making process, personal animosities, and departmental silo-

thinking prevent the required level of collaboration and conces-

sion making in sourcing and other SCM committees.

Despite the acknowledgment of misaligned incentives, ineffec-

tiveness, and conflict in cross-functional sourcing teams (Sheth

1973), empirical insights on the particular problems and their

potential detrimental effects are still limited. Although metathe-

ory in the field prominently discusses the team level (Schorsch

et al. 2017), it remains empirically underrepresented given the

traditional focus on organizational-level buyer–supplier relations

(e.g., Zimmermann and Foerstl 2014). Today, especially conflict,

self-serving politics, and their mutual relationship in SCM team,

decision making remains underrepresented yet impactful phe-

nomena (Bai et al. 2016; Thornton et al. 2016). Given initial

case study evidence on conflict (e.g., Oliva and Watson 2011)

and politics in SCM teams (e.g., Stanczyk et al. 2015), we can

suspect that both have the potential to obstruct modern sourcing

organizations from reaping the benefits of cross-functional inte-

gration (Turkulainen and Ketokivi 2012). Considering these

research gaps, we pose the following research questions: (1)

How do (mis)aligned goals affect conflict and politics in cross-

functional sourcing teams and how are both related to each

other? (2) What are the implications of conflict and politics in

cross-functional sourcing teams?

Figure 1 shows the framework that derives from our research

questions. By further specifying and testing the model we derive

from the framework above, we contribute generally by answering

the call for more “people-focused”SCM research, which is the

primary underestimated SCM research theme today (Wieland

et al. 2016; Schorsch et al. 2017). More specifically, this paper

advances our conceptual and empirical understanding of Organi-

zational Buying Behavior (OBB) as it begins to unravel the hith-

erto ignored internal relationships among OBB concepts on

conflict, politicking, and negotiation (Sheth 1973). Specifically,

we jointly consider conflict, politics, and their relationship in

SCM decision-making processes. Thus, our study deepens and

Corresponding author:

Kai Foerstl, German Graduate School of Management & Law

(GGS), Bildungscampus 2, 74076 Heilbronn, Germany; E-mail:

kai.foerstl@ggs.de

Journal of Business Logistics, 2020, 41(1): 6–30 doi: 10.1111/jbl.12225

© 2019 Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals

extends the original OBB theory and taps into the relatively

uncovered area of team politics (Vigoda-Gadot and Vashdi 2012).

Accordingly, our contribution can be understood as middle-range

theory elaboration of OBB that enlightens a deeply rooted practi-

cal problem in firms’sourcing and SCM teams (Garver 2019).

Moreover, this is the first study to examine team-level politics

with large-N empirical methods in SCM and continues the yet

emerging literature on conflict and politics in sourcing teams

(e.g., Marshall et al. 2015; Stanczyk et al. 2015). Hence, we pro-

vide empirical evidence on political decision-making processes at

the team level and add detail to the benefits and drawbacks of

the cross-functional organizational buying centers. Considering

the study context, our results allow for careful extrapolation to

other cross-functional, temporary, and interdependent team set-

tings in SCM research such as outsourcing or location decisions.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: First, we

highlight how exactly our study relates to the sourcing and OBB

literature as our conceptual foundation, review the emerging

SCM team research, and give an overview of today’s ambiguous

research on the “conflict–politics link.”Thereby, we define our

concepts of interest before deriving our hypotheses based on

extant SCM and general management insight. We continue to

present our methodology and channel our results into a discus-

sion of findings based on various robustness checks and comple-

mentary analyses. We conclude with the implications of our

research and future research opportunities that may fill the limita-

tions that we accepted in this study.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES

DEVELOPMENT

Context and theoretical grounding

Strategic decision about the upstream supply chain is usually car-

ried out in cross-functional sourcing teams (Driedonks et al.

2010; Flynn et al. 2010). Functional representatives come from

diverse backgrounds such as purchasing, marketing, or R&D and

usually have divergent goals, expertise, or decision-making styles

(Moses and



Ahlstr€

om 2008; Kaufmann and Wagner 2017). In

addition, cross-functional sourcing teams are examples of task-

based functional integration that serves to solve a particular sour-

cing task through temporal rather than permanent integration

(Miller and Dr€

oge 1986; Foerstl et al. 2015). Hence, such a team

can be defined as a collection of individuals with distinct nonre-

dundant skills from different units with a common purpose of

enhancing the performance of a particular supplier selection

(adapted from Mohsen and Eng 2016). Conversely, collaborative

planning, forecasting, and replenishment would rather be imple-

mented in permanent “embedded”(i.e., permanent) teams (Foer-

stl et al. 2015). Our study focuses on temporal “task-based”and

interdependent sourcing teams and the vital impact of their deci-

sions on modern business organizations (Barney 2012; Riedl

et al. 2013). Our idea of a sourcing team thus reflects the notion

of the buying center in Organizational Buying Behavior (OBB).

Organizational Buying Behavior literature has established that

corporate buying is a multidimension, multiperson, and thus mul-

tiperspective process, laying grounds for behavioral research in

sourcing teams (Webster and Wind 1972; Sheth 1973). Interest-

ingly, original OBB models do account for conflict, negotiation,

bargaining, and politicking as irrational sources of inefficiency in

buying centers (Sheth 1973; Johnston and Lewin 1996). The

general model in Webster and Wind (1972) speaks explicitly of

conflict and so-called “personal–political tactics”that can mani-

fest in “reliance on informal relationships and friendships to get

decision made and an exchange of favors with other members of

the buying center”(p. 18). Despite their acknowledgment, we

lack empirical evidence on those challenges and how they may

interact in buying processes. Consistently, Sheth (1996) con-

cluded that the OBB research stream has not been fully

exploited, particularly where it relates to global sourcing teams.

Studies have suspected that conflict and political dynamics affect

purchasing and SCM decisions (Stank et al. 2001; Moses and



Ahlstr€

om 2008), yet hitherto not focused much on them but

often focused on the individual decision maker or the organiza-

tion as a whole (Schorsch et al. 2017).

Figure 1: Research framework.

Cross-Functional Sourcing Teams 7