Is Your Supply Chain Breaking Down? Call AAA for Resilience Assistance

Abstract

Supply chain disruptions regularly interrupt the normal operations of organizations, impairing their financial, operational, and service performance. Therefore, organizations must develop capabilities to enhance their resilience–their ability to anticipate, overcome, and transform after disruptions. The literature proposes that agility, adaptability, and alignment (AAA capabilities) enhance long-term organizational success but does not explicitly link these AAA capabilities to resilience. Motivated by conversations with senior supply chain leaders, our research explores how organizations utilize practices, behaviors, and structures to build AAA capabilities in their pursuit of resilience over different phases of disruption. We use a grounded theory approach, conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews with supply chain executives. Our findings contribute to the supply chain resilience literature by (a) highlighting how distinct practices, behaviors, and structures support the development of distinct AAA capabilities, (b) demonstrating which AAA capabilities are most influential in enhancing resilience during specific phases of a disruption, and (c) illustrating how the AAA capabilities operate in a feedback loop to synergistically improve resilience over the lifecycle of a disruption.