Supply chain leadership driven strategic resilience capabilities management: A leader-member exchange perspective

Abstract Understanding a supply chain (SC) leader’s role from a collaborative capability management perspective offers insights into strategically managing exchange relationships during disruptions. This study illustrates the importance of leadership responsibility in managing overall resilience capabilities among SC network members. Using insights drawn from leadership theory, SC leader-member exchange (LMX) is operationalised to measure levels in exchange relationships. Furthermore, an integrative probabilistic-reliability management approach is applied to explore the impact of SCLMX on SC network resilience performance. The findings reveal (i) the significant role a buyer’s leadership can play in improving SC capabilities; (ii) the asymmetric roles of different capabilities in resilience improvement; and (iii) the need to further investigate the relationship between SC capabilities and resilience based on disruption phases. This study presents a novel and useful theoretical model for investigating the role and value of SC leadership in complex SC network collaboration.