Do Managers’ Dark Personality Traits Help Firms in Coping with Adverse Supply Chain Events?

This research investigates purchasing managers’ responses to adverse supply chain events. We build on attribution theory to examine how individual‐level factors—managerial personality traits, cognitive modes, and attribution of supplier responsibility—combine with firm‐level factors—buffering and bridging—to affect coping success. We combine an inductive process‐tracing approach with the neo‐configurational method of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Findings suggest that dark personality traits—traits that are generally regarded as socially aversive—are useful in coping with adverse supply chain events in combination with cross‐functionally integrated bridging, while the absence of dark personality traits is useful in combination with cross‐functionally integrated buffering. Our study contributes to the extant supply chain management literature in three ways: First, it highlights the role of dark personality traits in how purchasing managers react to supply chain risks. Second, it advances behavioral SCM literature by presenting nuanced findings on the effect of rational vs. intuitive cognitive processes in coping with such adverse events. Third, it contributes to attribution theory by providing a differentiated view on behavioral reactions following responsibility attributions. For managers, we find that high coping success might be achieved by seeking a fit between dark personality traits and firm actions. In addition, the results of the fsQCA demonstrate that supply chain research using configurational studies serves as a productive complement to traditional net effect analyses.