Finn Wynstra

Purpose: Managing projects is an important part of operations management, but many projects fail. This study focuses on attribution processes of such disruption from the underrepresented perspective of the project manager. The authors consider two types of causes: the more frequently researched environmental uncertainty (i.e. uncontrollable events) and the scarcely researched uncertainty imposed by non-collaborative project sponsors (i.e. other-controllable events).Design/methodology/approach: The authors test conceptual arguments grounded in attribution theory and the notion of psychological contracts in a scenario-based experiment among 325 practicing project managers.Findings: The findings indicate that non-collaborative project sponsors negatively affect project managers' motivation, whereas uncontrollable disruptions leave hope to achieve positive future outcomes. This latter effect is further strengthened when project managers have an internal attribution style. They tend to blame the disruption on themselves and generally feel in control of achieving success even if they are not.Originality/value: These socio-psychological insights nuance the economic idea that uncertainty reduces motivation per se in the context of project disruption appraisal. The authors contribute to the behavioral project management literature and general attribution theory and help guide the allocation of resources during the recovery of failed projects.

This exploratory study aims to develop a taxonomy of purchasing strategies at the purchase category level. We define strategies based on competitive priorities, an approach that is common in operations management literature, but very novel in purchasing. Analysing data collected from 318 manufacturing firms in ten countries through the use of cluster analysis, we identify five purchase category strategies: “Emphasise All, Cost Management, Product Innovation, Delivery Reliability, and Emphasise Nothing”. We subsequently investigate how this purchase category strategy taxonomy is related to the Kraljic matrix, a purchasing portfolio model utilised frequently in practice. We find that some strategies are more likely to be implemented in certain quadrants of the matrix but that within each quadrant, it is possible to implement various purchase category strategies in an effective way. This finding empirically validates our argument that existing portfolio models alone do not provide sufficient guidance for defining appropriate strategies.

We study the relationship between supplier involvement in new product development and performance. The current literature is scattered and fragmented with studies reporting mixed empirical evidence for a variety of concepts related to “Early Supplier Involvement.” We conduct a systematic review and meta‐analysis of the existing literature to reconcile conflicted findings, revise and refine theoretical perspectives, and provide evidence‐based scholarly and practical implications. To achieve these aims, we unravel the general relationship by considering three factors. First, we delineate different types of performance outcomes, mainly related to NPD efficiency (e.g., speed) and NPD effectiveness (e.g., product quality). Second, we distinguish between the moment and the extent of supplier involvement, related to different theoretical perspectives on external knowledge integration. Third, we disentangle multiple levels of analysis that are seemingly obscured in the literature, specifically the project and organizational levels. We find that extensive supplier involvement has positive effects on NPD efficiency and effectiveness, whereas earlier supplier involvement only to some degree affects NPD efficiency and not effectiveness. In conclusion, our meta‐analysis based on 11,420 observations from 51 studies provides strong theoretical and practical insights on the important phenomenon of supplier involvement.

While service outsourcing may benefit from the application of performance‐based contracts (PBCs), the implementation of such contracts is usually challenging. Service performance is often not only dependent on supplier effort but also on the behavior of the buying firm. Existing research on performance‐based contracting provides very limited understanding on how this challenge may be overcome. This article describes a design science research project that develops a novel approach to buyer–supplier contracting, using collaborative key performance indicators (KPIs). Collaborative KPIs evaluate and reward not only the supplier contribution to customer performance but also the customer's behavior to enable this. In this way, performance‐based contracting can also be applied to settings where supplier and customer activities are interdependent, while traditional contracting theories suggest that output controls are not effective under such conditions. In the collaborative KPI contracting process, indicators measure both supplier and customer (buying firm) performance and promote collaboration by being defined through a collaborative process and by focusing on end‐of‐process indicators. The article discusses the original case setting of a telecommunication service provider experiencing critical problems in outsourcing IT services. The initial intervention implementing this contracting approach produced substantial improvements, both in performance and in the relationship between buyer and supplier. Subsequently, the approach was tested and evaluated in two other settings, resulting in a set of actionable propositions on the efficacy of collaborative KPI contracting. Our study demonstrates how defining, monitoring, and incentivizing the performance of specific processes at the buying firm can help alleviate the limitations of traditional performance‐based contracting when the supplier's liability for service performance is difficult to verify.