Building routines for non-routine events: supply chain resilience learning mechanisms and their antecedents

Abstract

Purpose-Organisations must build resilience to be able to deal with disruptions or nonroutine events in their supply chains. While learning is implicit in definitions of supply chain resilience, there is little understanding of how exactly organisations can adapt their routines to build resilience. The aim of this study is to address this gap. Design/Methodology/Approach-An in-depth qualitative case study based on 28 interviews across five companies exploring learning to build supply chain resilience. Findings-This study uncovers six learning mechanisms and their antecedents that foster supply chain resilience. The learning mechanisms identified suggest that, through knowledge creation within an organisation and knowledge transfer across the supply chain and broader network of stakeholders, operating routines are built and/ or adapted both intentionally and unintentionally during three stages of a supply chain disruption: preparation, response and recovery. Practical implications-This study shows how the impact of a supply chain disruption may be reduced by intentional and unintentional learning in all three disruption phases. By being aware of the antecedents of unintentional learning organisations can more consciously adapt routines. Furthermore, findings highlight the potential value of additional attention to knowledge transfer, particularly in relation to collaborative and vicarious learning across the supply chain and broader network of stakeholders not only in preparation for, but also in response to and recovery from disruptions. Originality/Value-This study contributes novel insights about how learning leads both directly and indirectly to the evolution of operating routines that help an organisation and its supply chains to deal with disruptions. Results detail six specific learning mechanisms for knowledge creation and knowledge transfer and their antecedents for building supply chain resilience. In doing so, this study provides new fine grained theoretical insights about how supply chain resilience can be improved through all three phases of a disruption. Propositions are developed for theory development.

Operational resilience, disruption, and efficiency: Conceptual and empirical analyses

“…For these reasons, this research excludes adaptive and transformative resilience OBR elements from its conceptualization of operational resilience. Therefore, operational resilience as presented in this research does not epitomize the dynamic/adaptive capability view of resilience as applied in prior research (e.g., Scholten et al, 2019;Tukamuhabwa et al, 2015).…”

“…On the other hand, the OBR perspective argues that a system's resilience level cannot be ascertained in the absence of a disruption (Vogus and Sutcliffe, 2007). Within this stream of research, concepts such as disruption absorption, 1 recoverability, adaptability, and transformability have been identified as core OBR elements (Scholten et al, 2019;Pettit et al, 2019;Davidson et al, 2016). Following the OBR perspective, several empirical studies (e.g., Yu et al, 2019;Buyl et al, 2017;Brandon-Jones et al, 2014) argue that IBR elements do not capture the notion of resilience in that they cannot fully account for the variances in OBR elements.…”

“…Following the OBR perspective, several empirical studies (e.g., Yu et al, 2019;Buyl et al, 2017;Brandon-Jones et al, 2014) argue that IBR elements do not capture the notion of resilience in that they cannot fully account for the variances in OBR elements. That said, it is argued that IBR elements do not in themselves reflect the core conceptual domain of resilience (Davidson et al, 2016): at best, they are indicative of "formative resilience elements" (Scholten et al, 2019), "resilience-enhancers" (Blackhurst et al, 2011) or "drivers of resilience" (Hosseini et al, 2019).…”

“…We argue that since IBR elements may not guarantee the integrity and normal functioning of a system when a disruption occurs, analyzing the performance effects of resilience from the IBR perspective may mask important insights. In view of these, it can profit the progress of resilience research if future studies treat IBR elements as antecedents to OBR elements (Scholten et al, 2019;Brandon-Jones et al, 2014) and then link the latter to performance (Yu et al, 2019;Wong et al, 2019).…”

“…First, we theoretically specify the operational resilience construct from an output-base perspective and shed light on how such an approach to resilience conceptualization help clarify the ambiguity in the existing resilience literature. The proposed conceptualization of operational resilience in this study is useful for research and practice in that it detaches the conceptual drivers of the construct from its core components (Hosseini et al, 2019;Scholten et al, 2019), affording a fine-grained theorization and appraisal of the performance consequences of operational resilience at its component level (Manhart et al, 2020). Second, this study extends previous research on resilience-efficiency linkage (e. g., Wong et al, 2019;Yu et al, 2019) by explicitly linking each component of operational resilience to operational efficiency to uncover their unique performance values.…”