A Theoretical Model of Supply Chain Resilience Improvement: From an Improvisational Learning Perspective

Supply chain resilience reflects how companies embedded in supply chain respond collaboratively to environmental changes. It has been acknowledged as one key ability that can help companies navigating and surviving in turbulent environment. Although some companies began to follow effectuation and respond to unforeseen events through improvisational learning, there are differences in the learning ability in terms of emergency knowledge among individual enterprises. This variations in improvisational learning ability leads to the original knowledge sharing mechanism among companies showing poor information flow and in-time sharing. The difunctional knowledge sharing mechanism reduces the resilience of the supply chain. Moreover, due to information asymmetry, improvised learning behaviors of supply chain enterprises has cross-organizational characteristics. Yet how this special learning practice affects the overall resilience of the supply chain is less explored. In order to analyze how improvisational learning across companies improve supply chain resilience in total, this study constructed a theoretical model from an improvisational learning perspective by reviewing and analyzing papers. The paper first gives a definition of cross-organizational improvisational learning in supply chain companies. Then, the paper follows the analytical logic of “condition-interactive strategy-outcome” to construct a mechanism model of how firms can improve supply chain resilience in total through cross-organizational improvisational learning.