Seizing the challenges of contemporary Supply Chain Management (SCM), different concepts like risk management or resilience were developed and carried out in praxis. In the scientific literature, the focus lies actually on almost negative and partly on neutral influences on supply chains such as events, risks, disruptions and related terms that play a crucial role in strategic and operational characteristics of SCM as they are strongly related to the performance of supply chains. Compared to existing concepts in this area of SCM which have been reviewed in this paper, a need for a certain paradigm shift has evolved to consider influences onto supply chains in a more holistic perception than solely negative and neutral aspects. Therefore, we apply the term “stress” as an umbrella for all positive, neutral and negative influences that affect the supply chain. To investigate the relevance of supply chain stress management as an emerging concept and to derive the relative importance of prior selected supply chain stress factors, a web-based survey among supply chain practitioners was conducted in Germany and Bulgaria. By the aid of this cross-country analysis, two contributions to research are made. First, the need for a holistic management concept to capture all positive, neutral and negative influences on the supply chain was detected and second, these so-called stress factors were assessed concerning their relative importance and their concrete influence on SCM.