(2/7/2012) **UPDATED** Impact of Personality on Risk Perception in Procurement

** UPDATED **

The following interview was originally published in late 2011. The deadline for submissions has been extended, providing anyone who has not yet responded with an opportunity to be part of an interesting study taking place at The University of Manchester (UK) and Bowling Green State University (USA).

As a means of providing you with an update (although the analysis has not yet begun) here are some interesting observations about the participation itself from doctoral researcher Maja Puljic:

• The sample is VERY international, including responses from all continents, virtually from all over the world
• The industries our respondents work in are also very diverse - which is all great news as it will allow us a cross-national and cross-industry analysis
• We get a lot of qualitative feedback as well in terms of emails and messages. Many people write to me after they have taken the survey to let me know that they have indeed experienced situations at work where they thought the personalities of the individuals involved were playing a role, and were therefore very happy to help out with this research when they heard about it.
• Further, many wrote that they thought the design of the questionnaire was very interesting and impressive and that it had made them think about the role of behaviour in Purchasing & Supply Chain decisions. 

The optional providing of an email address at the end of the survey to receive an Executive Summary is being used to a very high extent - around 99% of the respondents so far have provided an email address and are interested in receiving the results. This indicates that Purchasing & Supply Chain Management professionals find the topic relevant and important, and that they are interested in further knowledge about it being generated.

Question: Do individual personalities of Purchasing and Supply Management professionals influence their risk perception and how does this affect decisions associated with Supply Chain Risk Management?

Answer: We don't know - YET. Why not help us find out?

That is the focus of a currently open study, which has been designed by an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers from Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester (UK) and Bowling Green State University (USA).

As part of the “Behavioural Approach to Supply Chain Risk Management” research project, they are conducting a survey and would like to ask the Buyers Meeting Point community to participate. The short questionnaire only takes about 15 minutes to fill in and the information you provide will be treated confidentially. Only average data will be presented in reports – no information from individual questionnaires will be revealed.

As a way of saying THANK YOU for your participation in this survey, they will send all participants who provide their email addresses an Executive Summary of the research findings once the analysis is completed. If you have any questions about the research, you can contact Maja at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

BMP Q&A with a Member of the Research Team

We pride ourselves on being curious people here at Buyers Meeting Point, and as we were just looking at procurement personalities on The Flip Side, we took this opportunity to reach out to Maja Puljic, a doctoral researcher working on the above mentioned survey.  Once you have read the exchange below and taken the survey, I think you will be just as interested as I am in reading the summary once it is available. We are going to stay in touch with Maja and plan to continue covering their work. I highly encourage you to participate in this fascinating study of our personalities and the impact they may have on our work. The survey is open through December 31, 2011.

How did you settle on the topic of procurement personalities as the focus of your research?

As part of my research on supply chain risks, I wanted to address the human factor, e.g. the role of individuals in supply chain risk management – because this is currently still an area we don’t know much about.  Yet if we are fully to understand how supply chain professionals make decisions that can lead to or prevent supply chain disruptions, we cannot focus only on structural and technical factors and ignore the behavioural elements, as they are an important factor in that equation. We know from research in other disciplines that business managers perceive risks subjectively, and that the perception of business risks is shaped not only by organisational and environmental factors, but also by individual properties of the decision-maker. This includes personality traits, individual biases, past experiences, subjective preferences, individual style, etc. The focus of this particular study are personality traits and cognitive patterns, and their influence on managerial perceptions of supply chain risks.

Interdisciplinary Team. Does anyone on your team have a background in procurement or supply chain? If so, how did those individuals find their way to organizational psychology?

Our research is interdisciplinary in the truest sense of the word: not only does the topic merge supply chain risk research with organisational psychology, but the research team itself consists of supply chain management researchers and organisational psychologists.  The idea for this research came from supply chain risk researchers, who wanted to address the behavioural factors in supply chain risk, and wanted to do that at a high level of rigour and quality – and this meant joining up with “real” psychologists – which is how the team was formed.  Other core members of our team are a leading supply chain risk researcher from Bowling Green State University – Dr. George Zsidisin (if you read articles and books on Supply Chain Risk, you are more than  likely to have come across his name), and a top personality psychologist and psychometrician from Manchester Business School – Dr. Paul Irwing. I myself am a member of both International Supply Chain Risk Management Network (ISCRiM) and the Psychometrics at Work Research Group (PaW).  Additionally, we seek input from practitioners at different stages of the project to ensure the relevance of our findings. For example, the survey we are currently running addresses procurement professionals as respondents, so that we can draw our conclusions from real-world data. That “real world” input is crucial for this research with which we also aim to provide insights that will benefit the procurement and supply chain practice.

Without affecting the results of the survey, are there any assumptions or theories on procurement individuals that you are testing and can share with us?

Without explaining details that could possibly influence the results of the survey – the underlying assumptions of this study are that there are certain personality traits and mental patterns that directly influence a manager’s perception of supply risks – and that the perceived risks will vary between personalities – even when the individuals are operating in similar environments and have to make decisions under similar circumstances. We further assume that this has an influence on purchasing decisions, and in particular on decisions associated with the awareness and management of supply risks.

Do you expect to be able to make recommendations about either the changes procurement professionals need to make in their approach to managing risk or a different professional profile for successful procurement professionals altogether?

We hope to contribute to a better understanding of the role of personality and cognition in the management of supply chains. We hope to be able to make recommendations about how procurement managers can better understand how certain personality traits and biases make them perceive and judge things aligned with their already existing mental patterns. Becoming aware of one’s own biases and tendencies can help correct judgment errors (we call this “de-biasing”) we all sometimes subconsciously make, and thus improve the quality of one’s decision making – which is crucial for effective supply chain risk management.