A Theoretical Framework for Supply Chain Resilience Planning

The current literature on resilience planning, especially related to supply chains, rarely considers the difference between intended and actualized behaviors toward mitigation and adaptation actions. However, a potential contributor to taking on supply chain pre-disaster planning tends to be individual and institutional risk perceptions encountered in the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Ajzen I Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50:179–211, 1991). The theory suggests that an agent’s intentions to implement mitigation and/or adaptation actions inform their resilience capacity toward a given disaster event that is comparable to data on interruption and recovery post-event. The gist of this chapter hinges on the idea that supply chain management (SCM) has been largely successful in providing a normative framework supporting decisions involved in the design (e.g., plant location, sourcing and procurement, transportation), planning (e.g., demand forecasting, aggregate planning), coordination (e.g., organizational talent, collaboration, and integration), and risk management (e.g., excess capacity, inventory buffers, suppliers diversification); however, the field has largely not addressed the underlying behavioral mechanism that drives an agent’s decision-making process in the specific context of pre-disaster planning (i.e., mitigation) and adaptation decisions. Failing to understand why intention and actualized behavior toward mitigation and adaptation differ is an obstacle to effectively coping with disruption risks and may pose a threat to the resilience of the supply chain given that some mitigation actions aim at building or increasing a firm’s inherent resilience capacity and at improving its ability to adapt to disruptions potentially affecting business continuity. This topic is particularly relevant for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that play a critical role within their communities and do not have resources to incorporate sophisticated business continuity plans or emergency management plans within their risk management frameworks.