Impact of culture on supplier selection decision making

Purpose – Source location decision making is a contemporary problem facing many businesses as they globalize their supply chains. This paper seeks to empirically determine the influence of culture on the industrial procurement manager's perception of the different characteristics of potential global sourcing locations, with a view to integrating the influence of culture operating at different levels into a global sourcing location decision framework; thereby enhancing managerial insights to the role played by culture in making decisions.Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies factor analysis and multiple regression on a survey sample of 181 responses gathered from native eastern and western procurement managers. The authors investigate how 12 procurement attributes drawn from the literature relate to each other with respect to low‐cost regions.Findings – The research results show that procurement managers select regions for low‐cost sourcing based on both specific measures and individual and/or gr...