Determinants of the Level Participation and Influence in the Buying Center : An Analysis for Spanish Industrial Companies

The aim of this paper is to analyze the industrial buying behavior in order not only to improve the knowledge of buying industrial process carried by the organizations but also to identify the factors behind the level of participation in the buying decisions and the factors related with the degree of influence among the members of the buying center. Thus, we perform a survey of previous work on the relation between the variations of participation and the influence of the buying group, and the characteristics of purchase situation, the individuals and the organizational structure. Among conditions of purchase situation we consider those which most often appear in the prior research: novelty, product complexity, buying situation complexity, buying importance, time pressure and perceived risk associated to the purchase. With respect to individual characteristics, we include the personal stake and degree of experience. Finally, we consider the set of variables which characterize the company's organizational structure: work division, degree of formality of relations, decision-making centralization, standardization and configuration, as internal or anatomic structures, and size or dimension as factors of the specific environment. Furthermore, we test their explanatory power for a sample of Spanish industrial firms. LISREL statistical package is the tool used to verify the hypothesis proposed on the paper