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Ethical Purchasing Dissonance: Antecedents and Coping Behaviors

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Abstract

The pressure of oversight and scrutiny in the business-to-business purchasing process has the potential to cause psychological distress in purchasing professionals, giving rise to apprehensions about being ethically inappropriate. Utilizing depth interviews with public sector purchasing professionals in a phenomenological approach, the authors develop the notion of ethical purchasing dissonance to explain the psychological distress. An inductively derived conceptual framework is presented for ethical purchasing dissonance that explores its potential antecedents and consequences; illustrative propositions are presented, and managerial implications are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Approximately $3.5 trillion of the $6.7 trillion was spent at the state and local level. The total spending accounts for approximately 36 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (U.S. Budget table 15.2 2016), making public sector purchasing a significant part the U.S economy. The significance of public sector purchasing is a common theme across many, if not all, countries (Lindskog et al. 2010). For example, total spending in the United Kingdom is valued at over £260 billion, or approximately 13% of the U.K.’s GDP with the European Union spending valued at over £1.0 trillion (Institute for Government n.d) or approximately 14% of the European Union GDP (European Commission 2018). In Canada, the federal government alone spends $16.05 billion for goods and services (Government of Canada 2015).

  2. While EPD can also occur in the private sector purchasing contexts, it is more evident in the public sector because of the extra regulatory and media scrutiny. Our contextual focus in this study is on the public sector only.

  3. We acknowledge that EPD could also be driven by knowingly committing an unethical act and being fearful of repercussions; however, deliberate ethical violations are not our focus. Future research could expand on our conceptualization if access to data on deliberate ethical breaches is available.

  4. These specific factors were identified based on our phenomenological analysis, and fit with the psychological theory of the interactional model of personality. The interactional model of personality states that personality is a function of the interaction of a person and situational variables (Endler 1983). In the case of public sector purchasing, situational variables can be seen as the proposed institutional factors, while the intrapersonal/interpersonal factors represent the individual employee’s person variables.

  5. We define anxiety as feelings of apprehension or tension in response to threatening situations as first set out by Spielberger (2013).

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Layman award foundation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for their support for this research.

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  1. Jack Welch College of Business, Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, USA

    Tim Reilly

  2. College of Business Administration, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, USA

    Amit Saini

  3. College of Business, Missouri State University, Springfield, USA

    Jenifer Skiba

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Reilly, T., Saini, A. & Skiba, J. Ethical Purchasing Dissonance: Antecedents and Coping Behaviors. J Bus Ethics 163, 577–597 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-4039-3

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