Lean and Resilience in Healthcare Supply Chain: A Mediation Analysis

This article aims at examining the mediating role of resilience development on the association between lean principles adoption and operational performance in healthcare supply chain. This study carried out a survey of 123 Brazilian workers from healthcare supply chain. Two hypotheses were tested: H1 - Lean principles adoption positively impacts the resilience development in healthcare supply chain and H2 - The resilience development positively mediates the effect of lean principles adoption on operational performance in healthcare supply chain. It was carried out a set of Ordinary Least Square (OLS) hierarchical linear regression models to test the hypotheses. The results showed that both hypothesis were supported. Regarding the theoretical contributions, the study brings empirical evidence involving these relationships since these verifications are scarce in the literature. Regarding practical contributions, the results of this research can help managers to establish clearer expectations regarding the lean principles adoption into the healthcare supply chain in an environment with many disruptions. Moreover, lean and resilience are often treated individually and often as opposing forces. Therefore, this study shows that these two paradigms can be developed mutually and with a common goals, as the improvement of operational performance.