Supply chain resilience: When the recipe is more important than the ingredients for managing supply chain disruptions

Over the past two decades, considerable research has focused on enhancing supply chains’ capacity to cope with disruptions. Consequently, the concept of supply chain resilience (SCRE) has emerged, with the prevailing view that building resilience into the supply chain effectively manages disruptive events. However, given the concept’s nascent state, little is understood about the processes through which a supply chain becomes resilient. This study employs fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the configurations of managerial and organizational capabilities that contribute to improving the resilience of supply chains against both high- and low-impact disruptions. It identifies four key “recipes” that combine different resilience antecedents to enhance supply chain resilience. The findings illustrate how various combinations of organizational and managerial antecedents of SCRE, as suggested by the dynamic capabilities theory and its extension, the dynamic managerial capabilities theory, operate to build supply chain resilience. Additionally, the study demonstrates that principles of complexity theory—namely, asymmetric relationships, equifinality, and causal complexity—are integral to developing SCRE.