Role of flexibility, agility and responsiveness for sustainable supply chain resilience during COVID-19

Abstract

Supply chains are gradually transforming into more global structures. To ensure sustainability and resilience in face of the problems that arise in globalizing supply chains, it is becoming an important issue today; a supply chain must be flexible, agile and responsive. Therefore, the aim of the study is to focus on resilience in sustainable global supply chains (GSC) to avoid disruptions caused by pandemics such as COVID-19; it is also conducted research on responsiveness of sustainable global supply chains during COVID-19. In this study, dynamic capability perspective and contingency theory are used to conceptualize theoretical models for COVID-19. Moreover, a partial least squares (PLS) model is used to analyse the research hypotheses with 200 responses collected from companies which have complex supply chain structures. As a novel result, the relationship between flexibility, agility and responsiveness of global supply chain is revealed. Supply chain agility is found to be directly affected by supply chain flexibility. Moreover, supply chain flexibility and supply chain agility directly affect the responsiveness of the global supply chain. In addition, the agility of the supply chain acts as a partial mediator variable in the effect of supply chain flexibility on responsiveness.