Impact of Agility, Adaptability and Alignment on Humanitarian Logistics Performance: Mediating Effect of Leadership

Even though researchers have immensely contributed in the field of supply chain agility, supply chain adaptability and supply chain alignment, their impact on humanitarian supply chain performance and their relationship is not well known. Leadership is the most discussed and one of the most debated dimensions and little is known about leadership integration with a humanitarian supply chain network design. We carried out a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify variables and their items to design a structured questionnaire, which was pretested with experts in the humanitarian supply chain. We conducted an empirical study on a sample of 306 responses that were collected by us during Allahabad Kumbh from senior officials of the police department, Indian Railways, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Uttar Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation and third-party logistics (3PL) companies. We have used the exploratory factor analysis followed by the confirmatory factor analysis to check the construct validity of scales and goodness of fit. We further tested our hypotheses using regression analysis and mediation effect using Baron and Kenny's (1986) proposed steps. We further checked the mediation significance using the Sobel test. We found that supply chain alignment is a strong determinant of logistics performance and human performance. The supply chain agility is found to completely mediate between supply chain adaptability and human performance and partially mediate between supply chain adaptability and logistics performance. Leadership has a partial mediation effect between supply chain alignment and human performance.