Leadership and stewardship in public procurement: roles and responsibilities, skills and abilities

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the roles and responsibilities most important to public procurement practitioners to learn about procurement’s influence in the public management setting. Also, the skills and abilities associated with these roles and responsibilities are identified and discussed to implicate the strategic orientations of practitioner work and the skills and abilities that support these endeavors. Design/methodology/approach The 2020 National Institute of Governmental Purchasing (NIGP) survey is used as a method of primary data collection and analysis. Factor analyses are run to yield relationships between the roles and responsibilities in public procurement to determine what it is that public practitioners value the most in their work, as well as to control for skills and abilities, to implicate the ways in which these roles and responsibilities are approached from a strategic perspective. Findings The results demonstrate that public procurement roles and responsibilities do not easily fit into any one category of public management, and that qualitative factors in public procurement are rated to be more important than quantitative factors. Additionally, the skills and abilities deemed to be most important in completing these roles and responsibilities implicate qualitative traits such as building trust and credibility, effective communications and relationship management. Social implications The study demonstrates that although public procurement practitioners view the socio-economic roles and responsibilities to be most important, such as in creating a culture of continuous improvement, developing a thriving workplace, supporting an ethical workplace and providing professional development opportunities, that public procurement falls short because the actual implementation of social and environmentally sustainable policies and fostering of an ethical professional culture are not viewed to be important by practitioners. The study offers leadership and stewardship as an approach to combat this lack of follow-through by public procurement departments. Originality/value This study provides exclusive access to the 2020 NIGP study and, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is the first research of its kind to highlight the roles and responsibilities, skills and abilities viewed to be most important by public procurement practitioners. Additionally, the link between skills and abilities, and roles and responsibilities is discussed to implicate leadership and stewardship in the strategic orientations of public procurement.