Developing operational resilience to navigate transportation disruptions: the role and boundaries of efficiency priority

Operational resilience is crucial for navigating the increasing transportation disruption challenges, but building this capability can be expensive and sometimes result in inefficiencies. Meanwhile, firms must prioritize efficiency to remain competitive and profitable. However, it is unclear how and when firms’ pursuit of efficiency priority hinders or helps their resilience to specific disruptions. This research uses the theory of constraints to propose that while efficiency priority limits opportunities for improving operational resilience, buffering and bridging strategies lessen this constraint by enabling firms to align efficiency priority with operational resilience objectives. The study hypothesizes that these strategies positively moderate the negative effect of efficiency priority on operational resilience to transportation disruptions. These arguments are tested on primary data from a sample of 199 firms in Ghana using moderated regression analysis and the Johnson-Neyman technique. The results reveal that efficiency priority is negatively related to the disruption absorption dimension of operational resilience but unrelated to its recoverability dimension. Additionally, the study finds that under low conditions of buffering and bridging strategies, efficiency priority has stronger negative associations with both dimensions of operational resilience. In contrast, these relationships are positive under the high conditions of either strategy. These findings contribute to resolving existing debates on the efficiency-resilience link and have important implications for supply chain and business executives, as discussed in this article.