Pouring cement down one of your oil wells: Relationship between the supply chain disruption orientation and performance

Abstract The Covid‐19 pandemic is triggering several supply chain disruptions that have a tremendous impact on firms’ activities. Consequently, firms have pushed suppliers to develop their disruption orientation through the exchange of information and collaboration with the aim to enhance their own performance. Although this is important from the industry perspective, relationships among the focal firm's disruption orientation, the suppliers’ disruption orientation, and the focal firm's performances have not been investigated in the literature. Hence, in order to fill this important gap, we investigate both (i) how the suppliers’ disruption orientation helps translate the focal firm's disruption orientation into environmental and economic performances and (ii) how the supplier ecocentricity (ability to learn from nontraditional stakeholders) is related to these relationships. In order to analyze these issues, we draw upon the dynamic capabilities, relational view, and stakeholder resource‐based view theories. Our results indicate that the focal firm's disruption orientation creates a positive association between its suppliers’ disruption orientation and its own environmental and economic performances. Further, our results reveal that the association between the firm's disruption orientation and environmental performance is not necessarily direct and occurs through the suppliers’ disruption orientation. Our study also reveals that the positive association between the focal firm's disruption orientation and environmental performance through suppliers’ disruption orientation is stronger under medium and high levels of suppliers’ ecocentricity. Our results provide useful managerial insights for supply chain stakeholders that could help in managing disruption orientation, especially during and after a pandemic.