The Effect of Supply Chain Disruptions on Organizational Performance: Mediating Role of Supply Chain Resilience and Moderating Role of Firm Flexibility

Abstract

In today’s interconnected business world, supply chain disruptions from supplier failures, policy crises, logistics breakdowns, or pandemics inflict serious multidimensional damage: financial loss, operational inefficiency, eroding customer satisfaction, and weakened strategic positioning. Despite growing awareness, there is little empirical insight into exactly how these disruptions hurt performance and under what conditions organizations can soften the blow. This thesis investigates that relationship, testing supply chain resilience as a mediator and firm flexibility as a moderator. Drawing on the Dynamic Capabilities View, resilience is framed as a dynamic capability that helps firms absorb, adapt, and recover from shocks. Using an integrated mediation-moderation model, the study finds that disruptions severely undermine organizational performance. Resilience partially mediates this link, cushioning the negative impact and supporting recovery. More importantly, firm flexibility proves to be a powerful boundary condition: in highly flexible firms, the disruption–performance connection is weaker, while the resilience–performance connection is stronger. The thesis contributes a combined model of resilience and flexibility that shapes performance outcomes during turmoil. The practical message is that resilience strategies truly pay off when backed by flexible organizational structures that can quickly reconfigure operations and strategy.