The Impact of Strategic Human Resource Practices on Supply Chain Resilience: The Roles of Workforce Agility and Supply Chain Integration

Abstract

With a number of supply chain disruptions, geopolitical unpredictability and accelerating technological transformation, organizations are finding it a strategic level to utilize human capital to increase their supply chain resiliency. This paper explores how strategic human resource practices (SHRP) have an effect on supply chain resilience (SCR) through a mediating variable of workforce agility (WA) and a moderating variable of supply chain integration (SCI). Based on the Dynamic Capability Theory, we theorize workforce agility as a dynamic capability of the human level that converts HR investments into dynamic supply chain delivery. The respondents were 312 managerial level employees of manufacturing and service sector companies in an emerging economy setting. The performance was conducted in terms of Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) which revealed that SHRP has a direct and indirect positive impact on SCR via WA. Besides, SCI plays a major role in enhancing the relationship between SHRP and WA, indicating the conditional nature of integrated supply chains in exploiting human-based capabilities. The results highlight the importance of the interaction between HR systems and workforce agility and structural integration in the creation of resilient supply chains and provide empirical evidence on what actions can be taken by managers and policymakers to find human-centered resilience solutions in volatile environments.