Supply chain security culture: measure development and validation

The purpose of this paper is to present a newly developed scale useful for measuring supply chain security culture (SCSC), defined as the overall organizational philosophy that creates supply chain security as a priority among its employees through embracing and projecting norms and values to support secure activities and to be vigilant with security efforts.

The approach to developing a scale for SCSC follows the steps presented by Churchill. This includes conducting steps such as: generating items, establishing face and content validity, conducting a pretest to refine items, and validating the scale through an additional data collection so reliability, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity can be evaluated.

The process yielded a unidimensional, five‐item scale with strong psychometric properties. Through empirical verification, this scale is shown to exhibit high levels of reliability and validity.

Organizational culture has been a construct of interest in social science research for many years. The new phenomenon of supply chain security has been recently introduced to academics and practitioners. Thus, the presented scale has applications for theory and practice. Limitations of the study include allowing one error term to correlate in the SCSC scale and the resiliency scale, a somewhat low response rate, and no ability to test for common method variance bias.

Practitioners will find the presented scale useful in gauging the culture of their respective organizations in terms of supply chain security. A security focused culture is important for organizations to protect their supply chain.

The paper provides a useful measurement tool for use in future research addressing the social aspects of security management within the supply chain context.