Between alignment and competition: supply chain resilience and working capital in practice
研究通过两轮焦点小组访谈，揭示采购、供应链与财务部门的跨职能协调是平衡韧性与营运资本的关键，并分析权力不对称和信任如何影响企业的优先选择。
This study examines how firms balance supply chain resilience and working capital management by integrating operational and financial perspectives. While the relationship between financial flows and resilience has been increasingly recognised, cross-functional tensions between finance and operations remain underexplored. We draw on two focus group sessions conducted in 2022 and 2024, involving 29 managers from diverse industries and firm sizes, and apply the Gioia method for inductive analysis. The findings show that cross-functional alignment between purchasing, supply chain, and finance is a critical antecedent of coherent resilience and working capital practices. When alignment is weak, firms implement conflicting practices that undermine both liquidity and resilience. When alignment is strong, perceived asymmetries in power and trust in partners’ resilience shape prioritisation of resilience and working capital. Firms with favourable power positions tend to shift working capital burdens to supply chain partners, whereas firms facing unfavourable power conditions prioritise resilience. When perceived power is unfavourable and trust is low, adaptation measures are prioritised over more common persistence measures. We further show that improvements in internal financial processes, most notably order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay, can enhance both resilience and working capital performance. The study contributes to supply chain resilience literature by foregrounding the role of finance and resilience for purchasing and supply managers to align with financial colleagues, and by reframing the resilience–working capital interface as an organisational coordination problem rather than an optimisation trade-off.