Boundaries as opportunities: A multilevel investigation of resilience

Within every supply chain (SC), organizations face disruptions that arise because these organizations depend on one another for materials and services. Regrettably, however, the predominant—albeit understandable—focus of extant SC literature on large-scale disruptions has prevented this literature from offering useful insights on how organizations can increase their resilience to the smaller, more typical disruptions that affect organizations nearly daily. Similarly, a principal focus on the organizational and, occasionally, relationship levels of analysis has inhibited extant SC literature from developing a more comprehensive understanding of how multiple organizations may work across or bridge their boundaries to increase their joint resilience. This restricted focus on primarily the organizational level has also limited insights into the role of individuals and teams in ensuring organizational resilience.

This dissertation responds to these ambiguities by examining different bridging actions in response to various types of (day-to-day) disruptions and across multiple levels of analysis. We find that a day-to-day disruption is more harmful when it coincides with other such disruptions in the SC, and when it represents an unfamiliar event of which the affected organizations have little relevant experience. We further reveal how bridging actions at the team (information scouting), relationship (promoting breadth and depth), and SC level (cross-boundary information exchange) may assist organizations and SCs in increasing their resilience to, especially, these disruption characteristics. We also demonstrate, however, that such bridging actions become less effective or even counterproductive as situational characteristics become less demanding or when these actions are not attuned to intraorganizational processes.