In an increasingly dynamic business environment, the concept of resilience is fundamental to understanding how employees successfully handle adversity. Yet, the operationalisation of the concept, the factors which lead to its development, and how and why it influences outcomes of interest to organisations are issues still under debate in the literature. In this article, we address these debates by undertaking a critical review of research on resilience in the workplace at both the individual and team levels. We pinpoint different conceptualisations of resilience and highlight how resilience has been measured in extant quantitative work. Further, we provide a systematic literature review of empirical work on the antecedents and outcomes of resilience at the individual and team levels, as well as conduct a review of work that has introduced resilience as a moderator or mediator. In doing so, we highlight theoretical approaches that have been adopted to study resilience in the workplace. Based on our review of the extant empirical work on resilience, we develop a roadmap for future research. In particular, we pinpoint relevant theoretical approaches that help us understand the mechanisms underlying the development and outcomes of resilience and highlight opportunities for empirical advancement of the literature.
Summary
The complex nature of work tasks leads many organizations to organize work around teams, which must develop the capacity to cope with and adapt to a variety of adverse situations. However, our knowledge and understanding of what enables and inhibits the development of resilient teams, that is, change in teams' resilience capacity, have yet to be fully developed. Drawing on the build hypothesis of broaden‐and‐build theory, we explore the dynamic emotional, social, and cognitive elements that underlie change in team resilience capacity. We posit that a change in a team's emotional culture of joy predicts change in team resilience capacity through both social and cognitive mechanisms (i.e., change in mutuality and change in reflexivity). The results from a two‐wave study involving 91 teams (comprising 1291 individual responses) indicate that the positive relationship between change in the emotional culture of joy and change in team resilience capacity is mediated by change in mutuality and change in reflexivity. This research advances the emerging literature on team resilience by theoretically delineating the underlying affective, social, and cognitive collective mechanisms that lead to within‐team variability in team resilience capacity.
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