Nudging resilience: Designing decision environments for responding to and recovering from operational disruptions

Supply chains are not only disrupted when structures fail, but also when managers cannot make fast, sound decisions under pressure. Yet, while the structural foundations of supply chain resilience, including redundancy, modularity, and buffer capacity, are well established, the behavioral mechanisms that determine whether managers deploy them effectively during disruptions remain largely unexamined. This study addresses that gap by investigating how supply chain managers use behavioral nudges to shape decision environments during operational disruptions. Drawing on 46 semi-structured interviews across two in-depth case studies in contrasting sectors, we adopt an exploratory, theory-building approach and conceptualize these contexts along a theoretically grounded control-versus-adaptability continuum. Our findings reveal that nudges are phase-contingent and context-dependent: reflective-transparent nudges, such as reminders and checklists, support deliberate and auditable execution in compliance-intensive environments; while automatic-transparent nudges, such as defaults and visual prioritization cues, enable coordinated, adaptive responses in fast-changing, technology-driven settings. We develop a novel framework that positions resilience as a behavioral-structural hybrid capability. The practical implication is direct: managers can deliberately engineer decision environments to improve how their organizations respond to and recover from disruptions, making resilience not just a structural state, but a behavioral one.