When the Going Gets Tough: Extraordinary Efforts by Suppliers during Supply Chain Disruptions

Jie Chen and her colleagues (Xiande Zhao - China Europe International Business School and Barbara Bechler Flynn - FGV-EAESP). Have published a paper on supply chain disruption.

During COVID, some suppliers made extraordinary sacrifices — even absorbing millions in losses — to keep filling customers’ orders when contracts everywhere else were being cancelled. Our paper asks: why? We introduce a new concept, Supply Chain Citizenship Behaviour (SCCB) — discretionary, above-and-beyond acts between firms — and find that affective commitment (a genuine emotional bond to the customer) is the strongest driver of these behaviours during a crisis, outweighing pure economic dependence. The work extends organisational citizenship behaviour theory to relationships between firms in the supply chain. It elevates citizenship behaviours from "social lubricants" into strategic imperatives for resilience, and shows how well-established relationship factors actually behave under an extreme crisis rather than routine conditions. Managers can use these findings to identify and cultivate the relationships to deliver extraordinary support when it matters most.

Use this link for more information on this paper – https://www.emerald.com/ijopm/article-abstract/46/7/1152/1364004/When-the-going-gets-tough-extraordinary-efforts-by?redirectedFrom=fulltext