Organizational Archetypes in Public Procurement

Abstract

The paper analyses a situation where the efficient public procurement legislative framework formally exists, but in practice, the process does not work as planned. The data were gathered from one hundred contracting authorities in the Republic of Serbia, based on a nationwide survey conducted on public procurement officers (PPOs) and end-users (ENUs) in all contracting authorities. We propose a model for measuring organisational discrepancies and classifying public procurement processes (PPP) into one of four organisational patterns, based on organisational decision-making authority and focused on goals and principles. The Mann-Whitney U (MWU) test was used to test the independent responses from two hundred PPOs and ENUs on the items – who works, who is accountable, and who has benefits, for seven key public procurement activities. The statistical analysis shows that the public procurement process in Serbia can be classified as a process with centralised organisational decision-making authority, focused on form, with demotivated public procurement officers. The efforts for further improvement of the legislation are not expected to reach their full potential until solving organisational structure, reward system, environment, and culture issues.