The Global Supply Chain Resilience Paradox as an Ethical Dilemma: Trade‐offs, Tensions, and Multilevel Strategies in Times of Crisis and Disruption

This research examines the resilience paradox in global supply chains, exploring how trade-offs between economic and social-ecological resilience escalate into managerial dilemmas under high environmental uncertainty. Using an abductive theory extension approach, we analyse a multinational automotive supply chain case during the Covid-19 crisis through a real-time Delphi study with managers from OEMs, suppliers, importers and retailers, supported by archival and observational data. The results show that organisational and environmental constraints, including resource scarcity, power dependencies, measurement systems and conflicting stakeholder demands, can intensify crisis-induced trade-offs. These trade-offs are associated with ethical dilemmas and temporarily unsustainable performance outcomes such as increased emissions, workforce strain and reduced sustainability investments. Our findings suggest that ethical sensemaking supports managers to move from crisis-induced trade-offs towards multilevel paradoxical response strategies. The study extends paradox theory by identifying ethical dilemmas as managerial-level manifestations of undecidable crisis-induced trade-offs, showing how ethical sensemaking connects these dilemmas with multilevel paradox response strategies and identifying the crisis conditions under which the resilience paradox becomes salient.