Purchasing Executive: General Manager or Specialist?

Purchasing Executive: General Manager Or Specialist? What kind of executives are the men at the top of the purchasing group in a large corporation? Are they specialists? Are they top managers? Or are they both? What sort of corporate fellows are they? Men in this field of work may well be undecided about their role. These kinds of questions can be answered by comparing specific definitions of the following three terms: top-level executive, specialist, and high-level purchasing executive. Depending on the definitions used (and these can vary greatly depending on who states them), the high-level purchasing man will fall into one or another of the categories listed above. In terms of responsibility for the corporation's purchasing resources, there is no question that the high-level purchasing man is at the level of top management. Yet, he is a specialist in the sense that his work or that of this group requires very special knowledge not needed by anyone else in the corporation. Another approach is to compare men in purchasing with men in general management, in order to determine in what ways they are similar or different. This might lead to some relevant information. Always intriguing is the comparison of groups in terms of some aspect of personality. We do this often in terms of certain stereotypical notions we have of particular types of people. For example, controllers are careful and fussy; research people, clever and impractical; Germans are precise and stubborn; Italians, hard workers and emotional. Why not compare purchasing executives and top general managers in this way? This is the approach taken in this paper. A large sample is taken of each group, and they are compared in terms of their personal "values." In the present context, values are interesting on two counts. First, they are a very basic aspect of personality; values underlie the way a person looks at the world. Second, as such, they influence business decisions. Are general managers and purchasing officers alike or different in this respect? Do they tend to see things the same way? If not, is the nature of the differences enough to be the cause of conflict over issues at work? But before purchasing executives and general managers are compared in this manner, it is necessary to consider in greater detail what the concept of "values" represents. NATURE OF VALUES "Values" is a term used both in lay and in technical parlance. When we observe others choosing different alternatives than we would, we often explain it by saying, "Well, they have different values," and we often accompany this explanation with some feeling of disapproval. For this paper, the following definition is appropriate: A value is a conception, explicit or implicit, of what an individual or a group regards as desirable, and in terms of which he or they select, from among alternative available modes, the means and ends of action. Acquired very early in life, values are such an intrinsic part of a person's life and thought that he tends to take them for granted, unless they are questioned or challenged. They are transmitted to him through his parents, teachers, and other significant persons with whom he comes in touch. These persons, of course, acquired their values in a similar fashion. As with most of the characteristics acquired in the first few years of life, we have difficulty identifying our own values until we come face to face with situations, such as people very different from ourselves, that force us to recognize their presence in our make-up. Values are part of personality. When we say that a man consistently chooses from among possible alternatives those that maximize his usefulness to others, rather than those that optimize personal gain, we are describing his values as well as his personality. Values are a very stable feature of a personality, especially if some values clearly are dominant. …