During the recent years, organizations have been consolidating their purchasing volumes increasingly in order to achieve decreased purchasing costs and increased purchasing leverage through purchasing synergies. As most organizations tend to choose a hybrid model for their sourcing organization, the operational tasks of procurement remain in the hands of individuals and units across the organization while the responsibility over creating and managing supplier relationships is transferred to a central purchasing unit. However, such setting is ideal for the non-compliant purchasing behavior, maverick buying, to occur, causing the organization major losses of expected cost savings.
While maverick buying has recently been studied as a phenomenon, the approach on reducing it has been after the consolidation of purchasing volumes. In this paper, the emphasis is moved to an earlier stage of the process. The previous suggestions on ways to reduce maverick buying are critically examined and their strengths and weaknesses are identified. Furthermore, a new approach of organizational change caused by the purchasing consolidation is introduced. The findings of this paper suggest that when this organizational change is managed poorly, the poor level of commitment to change occurs as maverick buying. Thus, the two most common approaches on organizational change, planned and emergent change processes, are presented and connected to consolidating purchasing volumes and reducing maverick buying. In doing so, this paper provides direction for future research and for identifying concrete suggestions on preventing maverick buying
