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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the evolution of service supply chain management from a behavioural operations perspective, pointing out future research directions for scholars.

This study searched five databases for relevant literature published between 2009 and 2018, selecting 64 papers for this review. The selected literature was categorised according to two dimensions: a service supply chain link perspective and a behavioural factor perspective. Comparative analysis was used to identify gaps in the literature, and five future research agendas were proposed.

In terms of the perspective of service supply chain link, extant literature primarily focuses on service supply and service co-ordination management, and less on service demand and integration management. In terms of the behavioural factor’s perspective, most focus on classic behaviour factors, with less attention paid to emerging behaviour factors. This paper thus proposes five research agendas: demand-oriented management and integrated supply chain-oriented behavioural research; broadening the understanding of the scope of behavioural operations; integrating the latest backgrounds and trends of service industry into the research; greater attention to behavioural operations in service sub-industries; and multimethod combination is encouraged to be used to dig into the interesting research problems.

This study constitutes the first systematic review of service supply chain research from a behavioural perspective. By categorising the literature into two dimensions, the state of existing research is evaluated with an eye towards future research avenues.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of inventory record inaccuracy due to behavioral aspects of workers on the order and inventory variance amplification.

The authors adopt a continuous-time analytical approach to describe the effect of inbound throughput on the inventory and order variance amplification due to the workload pressure and arousal of workers. The model is numerically solved through simulation and results are analyzed with statistical general linear model.

Inventory management policies that usually dampen variance amplification are not effective when inaccuracy is generated due to workers’ behavioral aspects. Specifically, the psychological sensitivity and stability of workers to deal with a given range of operational conditions have a combined and multiplying effect over the amplification of order and inventory variance generated by her/his errors.

The main limitation of the research is that the authors model workers’ behavior by inheriting a well-known theory from psychology that assumes a U-shaped relationship between stress and errors. The authors do not validate this relationship in the specific context of inventory operations.

The paper gives suggestions for managers who are responsible for designing order and inventory policies on how to take into account workers’ behavioral reaction to work pressure.

The logistics management literature does not lack of research works on behavioral decision-making causes of order and inventory variance amplification. Contrarily, this paper investigates a new kind of behavioral issue, namely, the impact of psycho-behavioral aspects of workers on variance amplification.

The purpose of this paper is to advance supply chain management by describing the current state of behavioral supply chain management (BSCM) research and paving the way for future contributions by developing a meta-theory for this important field.

The results are generated by applying the systematic literature review methodology and an iterative theory-building approach involving a panel of academics.

This review provides a comprehensive overview of the BSCM research landscape. Additionally, a meta-theory of BSCM is presented that encompasses all central elements of the research field and introduces the concept of emergence to the field of BSCM. Furthermore, five promising future research opportunities are formulated.

The critical discussions and the formulated research opportunities will help scholars in positioning their research to enhance its contribution.

Results from this research indicate that supply chain decisions benefit from explicit consideration for cognitive and social phenomena.

This review is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the field of BSCM research and facilitates BSCM in advancing further.

The success of a supply chain is highly reliant on effective inventory and ordering decisions. This paper systematically reviews and analyzes the literature on inventory ordering decisions conducted using behavioral experiments to inform the state-of-the-art.

This paper presents the first systematic review of this literature. We systematically identify a body of 101 papers from an initial pool of over 12,000.

Extant literature and industry observations posit that decision makers often deviate from optimal ordering behavior prescribed by the quantitative models. Such deviations are often accompanied by excessive inventory costs and/or lost sales. Understanding how humans make inventory decisions is paramount to minimize the associated consequences. To address this, the field of behavioral operations management has produced a rich body of research on inventory decision-making using behavioral experiments. Our analysis identifies primary research clusters, summarizes key learnings and highlights opportunities for future research in this critical decision-making area.

The findings will have a significant impact on future research on behavioral inventory ordering decisions while informing practitioners to reach better ordering decisions.

Previous systematic reviews have explored behavioral operations broadly or its subdisciplines such as judgmental forecasting. This paper presents a systematic review that specifically investigates the state-of-the-art of inventory ordering decisions using behavioral experiments.

Although supply chain managers serve a central role when implementing corporate environmental sustainability objectives, existing literature does not demonstrate high levels of supply manager support for such initiatives. This paper aims to investigate the potential of individual behavioral influences to explain supply manager orientation toward environmental responsibility.

This paper constructs a research model based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to explore how personal environmental motivations influence supply manager environmental behavior in the workplace. This paper also incorporates hyperbolic discounting as a cognitive bias moderator in the model. The research hypotheses were tested with regression of survey data of practicing supply managers in the USA.

Support was found for the direct TPB hypotheses, revealing the importance of an individual’s personal attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control on interpreting and applying the organization’s environmental sustainability objectives. Although the interactive effect of hyperbolic discounting as a cognitive bias was not supported, a direct effect was found.

The findings can help organizations improve supply manager support for sustainability initiatives.

Prior supply chain sustainability research has examined drivers and barriers at political, legal, economical and overall firm levels. This study expands this research base by investigating individual-level barriers and drivers related to personal responsibility for environmental sustainability. As a second contribution, integration of cognitive biases in the TPB has been understudied in existing literature.

This conceptual paper aims to explore how supply chain managers deal with social threats to supply chains, in the process of demonstrating the potency of a largely neglected strand of realist social theory. This theory, as posited, sheds a great deal of light on the behavioural reality of how supply chain managers operate within the social aspects of their risk environments.

The paper is presented as a narrative synthesis of classical realist sociological literature.

The Machiavellian approach provides a template that can be used to help academics and practitioners understand how and why supply chain managers orient themselves to the social threats they confront in very different ways. The theory’s contention that the behavioural reality can be subdivided between two basic patterns allows it to serve as a constructively simple template for becoming attuned to ways in which supply chain managers socially construct and act within their social threat environments.

The growing social complexity of supply chains gives behavioural responses a complexity reduction function. The authors theorise that such patterns, once activated, may not necessarily adapt rationally as guides to optimise the chance of success against the full range of social threats they are likely to encounter.

Cross-disciplinary supply chain management research is increasingly drawing upon sociology and behavioural science to facilitate greater understanding of not only the supply chain environment but also the roles of supply chain managers as relationship influencers and managers of conflict. The authors posit that Machiavellian–realist social theory can contribute to supply chain management scholarship by offering a constructively simple approach to evaluate the behavioural realities associated with social threats.

The recent surge in behavioral studies on the coordination mechanisms in supply chains (SCs) and advanced methods highlights the role of SC coordination (SCC) and behavioral issues associated with improving the performance of the operations. This study aims to critically review the behavioral aspect of channel coordination mechanisms.

Following a systematic literature review methodology, the authors adopt a combination of bibliometric (to reflect the current state of the field), content (using Leximancer data mining software to develop thematic maps) and theory-oriented qualitative analyzes that provide a holistic conceptual framework to unify the literature’s critical concepts.

The analysis confirms the plethora of risk-oriented publications, demonstrating that the second largest category of studies is concerned with social preferences theory. Most studies were based on experiments, followed by analytical modeling, revealing the impact of heuristics and individual preferences in SC decisions and suggesting promising managerial and theoretical avenues for future research.

The study sheds light on behavioral decision theories applied to SC coordination by categorizing the literature based on the adopted theories. The methodological contributions include using automated content analysis and validating the outcome by interviewing leading scholars conducting active research on “behavioral operations management and SC contracts.” The authors also propose several directions for future research based on the research gaps.

Effective inventory management is crucial for SMEs due to limited resources and higher risks like cash flow, storage space, and stockouts. Hence, the aim is to explore how technology and know-how can be integrated with inventory practices and impact operational performance.

The basis of the analysis was collecting papers from a wide range of databases, which included Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. In the first phase of the process, a search string with as many as nine related keywords was used to obtain 175 papers. It further filtered them based on their titles and abstracts to retain 95 papers that were included for thorough analysis.

The study introduced innovative methods of measuring inventory practices by exploring the impact of know-how. It is the first of its kind to identify and demonstrate how technical, technological, and behavioral know-how can influence inventory management practices and ultimately impact the performance of emerging SMEs. This study stands out for its comprehensive approach, which covers traditional and modern inventory management technologies in a single study.

The study provides valuable insights into the interplay between technical, technological, and behavioral know-how in inventory management practices and their effects on the performance of emerging SMEs in Industry 5.0 in the light of RBV theory.

The RBV theory and the Industry 5.0 paradigm are used in this study to explore how developing SMEs' inventory management practices influence their performance. This study investigates the effects of traditional and modern inventory management systems on business performance. Incorporating RBV theory with the Industry 5.0 framework investigates firm-specific resources and technological advances in the current industrial revolution. This unique technique advances the literature on inventory management and has industry implications.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how management attention and supply chain complexity affect the decision-making process and cost estimation accuracy of supply chain design (SCD) decisions.

The research follows an embedded case study design. Through the lens of the behavioural theory of the firm, the SCD decision process and realised outcomes are investigated through longitudinal data collection across ten embedded cases with varying degrees of supply chain decision-making complexity and management attention.

The findings suggest that as supply chain decision-making complexity increases, cost estimation accuracy decreases. The extent to which supply chain decision-making complexity is readily recognised influences the selection of strategies for information search and analysis and, thus, impacts resulting cost estimation errors. The paper further shows the importance of management attention for cost estimation accuracy, especially management attention based on conflicting goals induce behaviours that improve estimation ability.

A framework proposing a balance between supply chain decision-making complexity and management attention in SCD decisions is proposed. However, as an embedded case study the research would benefit from replication to externally validate results.

The method used in this study can identify how supply chain complexity is related to cost estimation errors and how management attention is associated with behaviours that improve cost estimation accuracy, indicating the importance of management attention in complex supply chain decision-making.

Large-scale projects are the typical delivery model in the engineering and construction industry, with their very own characteristics. Even though well established, only 1 in 1,000 large-scale projects is successful (Flyvbjerg, 2011). A lack of effective supply chain risk management (SCRM) has repeatedly been identified as one of the main causes. While the SCRM body of knowledge seems increasingly well established, a lack of effective methods meeting the specific requirements of large-scale projects can be observed.

This paper presents a structured and prioritized view on the supply chain risk portfolio in this sector: first, the authors identified and categorized the key supply chain risks in the recent literature. Next, the authors surveyed large-scale project managers across multiple industries, mainly coming from the domains of supply chain management and project management. Finally, the authors provide a contextualized risk taxonomy for engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) projects.

The identified risk portfolio deviates from generic projects significantly and shows a very high inherent risk exposure of large-scale projects. In particular, behavioral risks are identified as crucial. Additionally, a bias to considerably underestimate risks at project beginning is found.

The contextualized SCRM taxonomy offers a systematic and structured view on the key supply chain risks in EPC large-scale projects. The identified risks are considerably different in their characteristics compared to generic projects or classical SCRM approaches. The authors thus provide a new perspective on SCRM in this specific setting and complement traditional risk and project risk management techniques.