Resumo

Supply Chains (SCs) depend on inter-organizational relationships to function optimally. However, during crises, knowledge flows inside a SC may lessen the quality of an organization’s Market Orientation (MO). Current literature points to an unclear role of crises, whether they would affect knowledge generation, dissemination and reaction by strengthening or diminishing the crisis perception of SC links. This paper addresses this issue proposing a mediation effect between knowledge generation and market orientation by crisis perception in global BSB supply chains.

If, during crises, SC firms act as one, the existing literature posits that there will be an intense inwards search for solutions (Marchi et al. 2016); otherwise, if they behave as a collection of independent units, crisis perception will be mitigated by the quality in the knowledge generation and sharing (Chen et al. 2015). Thus, it is unclear whether relationships in a SC during crises will affect knowledge generation, dissemination and reaction by strengthening or diminishing the crisis perception of SC links.

During crises, organizations become rigid - their reactions to threats are impaired. This may lead both the SC as a whole as well as individual firms to enter an organizational decline phase and eventually go bankrupt. While the extant literature defines what kind of reactions will happen in a given organization facing a threat, it is not so clear about what happens to an SC in the same circumstances. The supply chain management literature is divided in two main axes - first, to treat the whole SC as one in terms of coordination and second, to treat each link in the chain as a single factor.

Partial-least square structural equation modelling was employed to test the hypotheses. Data collection comprised 279 full answers of B2B organizations in global SCs during the Covid-19 pandemic.

the main finding is the role of crisis. The extant literature points to the relational arrangement in SCs as a potential mitigator to crises, since through it individual firms in SCs have access to much more information and pre-processed knowledge (Grant, 2016). As a property, the SC should have provided means for individual firms to understand better the environmental changes and, as such, diminish their crisis perception. This hypothesis was rejected. In this sense our results go against extant literature.

Whereas knowledge management in SCs is an already established theme in the extant literature, there is still space for research on the role of crises on SC strategic management. While “crisis management” is also a repeatedly theme in research, rigidity following crises merits deeper understanding – as reactions to crises (crises, rigidity, reaction) are handled as a black box or, at least, as a very sensitive topic in SCs. Many gaps in current SC reaction to crisis papers are dependent on a keener look on how crises shape organizations’ knowledge management mechanisms.

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