The impact of quality management purchasing practices on purchasing performance in transitional economies

Abstract

This study examines the nature of relationships between quality management practices in purchasing and purchasing-related organisational performance within ISO 9001:2008 environment in transitional economies. The study was based on managers’ responses from 90 ISO 9001:2008 certified large organisations from Serbia. The findings show that quality management practices in purchasing positively affect purchasing performance. Further, purchasing performance is found to be a significant mediator between quality management practices and time-based performance. However, despite the overall good predictive model power, the explained variance on time-based performance is quite low. Thus, the effects on time-based performance are arguable. PLS-SEM Importance-performance analysis reveals that purchasing performance, cross-functional coordination and personnel management have relatively high performance, while benchmarking has the lowest value of the performance index. Consequently, the implementation of quality management practices in purchasing along with ISO 9001:2008 might be a part of a good strategic choice for transitional organisations to overcome troublesome transitional times. Still, the discrepancies between this study and the results from developed economies yield potential improvement areas on how organisations in transitional economies should manage purchasing practices.