How Decision Maker's Personal Preferences Influence the Decision to Backsource IT Services

摘要

To prepare their IT landscape for future business challenges, companies are changing their IT sourcing arrangementsby using selective sourcing approaches as well as multi-sourcing with more but smaller sourcing contracts. Companiestherefore have to reconsider and re-evaluate their IT sourcing setup more frequently. Collecting data from 251 global experts,we empirically tested the effect of service quality, relationship quality, and switching costs on IT sourcing decisions usingpartial least squares (PLS) analysis. Drawing on previously conducted expert interviews, our model extends previous studiesand introduces a decision maker’s sourcing preferences as a not yet examined moderator on IT sourcing decisions. Thisallows us to investigate the influence of the decision maker’s beliefs on the decision process. We were able to confirm thenegative effect of switching costs on a decision in favor of backsourcing, however we could not find significant support forthe remaining hypotheses. We further discuss potential reasons for our findings and suggest future research opportunitiesbased on our contribution.