Resilience in organizations denotes system agility and robustness, essential to survival and thriving in increasingly challenging contexts. Contemporary scholarship has acknowledged the relationship between employee resilience and organizational resilience. Yet interventions aimed at developing employee resilience tend to use stress and well-being as proxy resilience indicators, focusing primarily on individual rehabilitation or the development of personal resources. We argue that these interventions should also consider the development of organizational resources that ensure both the inherent and adaptive resilience of employees. This article introduces employee resilience as behavioral capability, signaled by adaptive, learning, and network-leveraging behaviors, and it discusses ways in which supportive organizational contexts enable the development and enactment of these behaviors. The article proposes a series of resilience-building initiatives, embedded in everyday practice, and elucidates how leading and organizing for the development of employee resilience contributes to improved well-being and performance.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new measure of employee resilience. Employee resilience is a key capability enabling employees to manage and adapt to continually changing circumstances. While there is an increasing body of research on how to best promote resilience among employees in organizations, the measurement of the construct has received less research attention. The measure introduced in this paper focuses on employee resilience as a work-related capability that can be developed. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents three survey-based studies describing the development of a new measure, the Employee Resilience Scale and its preliminary validation. Study 1 concerns the scale development and testing, along with a confirmatory analysis of the measurement structure in a different sample. Study 2 investigates the discriminant validity of the scale in relation to a well-known measure of personal resilience, the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale. Study 3 was concerned with work-related outcomes of employee resilience (e.g. job engagement). Findings Support was found for the unidimensionality of the scale in Study 1. Study 2 showed a clear differentiation between the two measures of resilience: employee resilience and personal resilience, supporting the discriminant validity of the measure. Study 3 provided evidence for the criterion-related validity of the scale. Research limitations/implications The three studies presented here provide preliminary support that the Employee Resilience Scale can be used to measure resilience among employees. Originality/value While the concept of employee resilience has gained attention in the literature, a measure of the construct has lacked. The study presents a valid measure of employee resilience which can be used to diagnose and develop a more adaptive workplace.

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) offer compelling arguments for the need to consider resilience trajectories and to identify the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and contextual factors accountable for unique trajectories. We welcome the call for more focused research efforts toward uncovering the role of resilience in organizations and concur with Britt et al. that there is a need for a clearer characterization of resilience among employees, the correlates of resilience, and the way that resilience can be facilitated. Our objective here is to build on the main thrust of Britt et al.’s focal article by outlining a novel perspective on employee resilience, which we believe will constitute an important contribution to the organizational resilience literature.

The resilience of employees has been recently identified as essential to organizational adaptability in uncertain and dynamic business environments. Yet little is known about how the resilience of employees can be developed. The present study investigated the effect of a wellbeing intervention on two forms of individual resilience: employees' stress‐coping ability (personal resilience) and resilient workplace behaviors (employee resilience). All participants (n = 209) completed an online wellbeing and resilience survey, and a subset of 145 participants took part in a workplace wellbeing intervention for a period of one month, followed by a second survey. The results indicated that personal and employee resilience are two related, but distinct, constructs. Further, following the wellbeing intervention, personal resilience remained stable, but small increases were noted in levels of employee resilience and aspects of wellbeing. Theoretical and practical implications of this research to employee resilience development are discussed.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the independent and joint effects of regulatory focus (promotion and prevention) on the relationship between workplace resources (support and feedback) and employee resilience. It proposed that, at high levels of resource availability, a high promotion-high prevention profile would elicit the highest levels of employee resilience. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was completed by 162 white collar employees from four organisations. In addition to the main effects, two- and three-way interactions were examined to test hypotheses. Findings Promotion focus was positively associated with employee resilience, and though the relationship between prevention focus and resilience was non-significant, both regulatory foci buffered against the negative effects of low resources. Employees with high promotion-high prevention focus displayed the highest levels of resilience, especially at high levels of feedback. Conversely, the resilience of low promotion-low prevention individuals was susceptible to feedback availability. Practical implications Employee resilience development and demonstration are contingent not only on resources, but also on psychological processes, particularly regulatory focus. Organisations will develop resilience to the extent that they provide workplace resources, and, importantly, stimulate both promotion and prevention perspectives on resource management. Originality/value This study extends the research on regulatory focus theory by testing the joint effects of promotion and prevention foci on workplace resources, and the relationship between regulatory foci and employee resilience.