The Roles Of Technology Usage,Regulatory Pressure And Competence

Organizations nowadays are turning their attention on operations improvement through proper management of their supply chain.Procurement as part of supply chain can play a significant role on operations improvement through better procurement performance.Given a number of challenges procurement in the public sector faces also in line with the current trend of globalization and innovation,organizations now are trying much to improve their procurement practices through technological applications.However,still there are contradictory results on the role of technology usage on performance of procurement;therefore this study was aimed at investigating the public procurement performance in Tanzania by examining on the roles played by technology usage,regulatory pressure and procurement competence.Drawing on the new perspective of resource based view(RBV)which put more emphasis on dynamic capability,institution theory and agency theory together with empirical evidences from literature a conceptual model with direct paths,mediated paths and moderated paths was developed through which procurement competence mediates the relationship between procurement practices and procurement performance,procurement practices and procurement competence together mediate the relationship between procurement technology usage and procurement performance,procurement regulatory pressure moderates the two direct paths that is the path from procurement practices to procurement performance and the path from procurement technology usage to procurement performance.This study has used cross section design using a structured questionnaire as the main instrument for data collections.The items in a questionnaire were adapted from previous seminal work with minor modifications based on the recommendations from the practitioners,academician and the results from the pilot study.All data collected were first assessed for data entry accuracy,missing data,suspicious response pattern,outlier's assessment and common method bias.The study used partial least square structural equation modeling(PLS-SEM)aided by SmartPLS 3 to validate the measurement model and test the hypotheses using data from 207 key informants from procurement management units of the public procurement sector in Tanzania.The results indicate significant positive effects for both direct and indirect path of procurement practices to procurement performance.However,the indirect path effect through procurement competence was stronger than the direct path.Furthermore,results indicated significant positive effects for both direct and indirect path of procurement technology usage to procurement performance.However,the indirect path effect through procurement practices and procurement competence was stronger than the direct path.The moderation effect of regulatory pressure on the association between public procurement practices and public procurement performance indicated a positive and significant effect,while the moderation effect of regulatory pressure on the association between technology usage and procurement performance was found to be significant and negative.Findings demonstrate the importance of procurement competence towards improving procurement management performance in the public sector organization.Moreover,the results indicate the significant role played by regulatory pressure in strengthening the association between procurement practices and procurement performance.Nevertheless,based on the findings from this study with the support from previous empirical studies,too much regulatory pressure tends to weaken the application of technology in procurement.The findings further suggests that the resource based view with dynamic capability as the main concern,the institution theory and agency theory are very important in explaining the relationship between technology usage,procurement practices,procurement competence,procurement regulatory pressure and procurement performance in the public procurement sector.Moreover,these results have implications to methodology,practitioners and policy makers.