Supply chain risk management and companies’ competitive advantage: a contingency perspective

During the last decades companies have seen an increased in their dependence from suppliers. As a result, companies’ competitive advantage strictly depends on suppliers’ reliability and performance. For this reason, Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) has become a major topic for both researchers and practitioners. Anyway, despite the effort put in place by previous authors, no framework has been developed that can help companies to develop SCRM effectively. In an attempt to fill this gap, the study proposes a model of congruence between SCRM practices and risk conditions, and carried out its empirical test. Specifically, this study aims to empirically investigate the existence of a negative relationship between misfit - i.e. the incongruence between the adoption of SCRM practices and the potential riskiness faced by companies - and competitive advantage. To achieve our objective we mixed inductive and deductive logics: literature and case studies were used to develop our proposition, while we tested it through a survey analysis on a sample of 54 companies. Results suggest that misfit to a risk profile is negatively related to companies’ competitive advantage.