Employee resilience: Directions for resilience development.

Abstract

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.

Resilient employees are creative employees, when the workplace forces them to be

“…With this novel and somewhat counterintuitive insight, this study complements research about the direct impact of adverse work conditions in steering employees away from positive work behaviours (e.g., Chen et al, ; Jam et al, ). Moreover, by affirming the hypothesized invigorating effects, we extend previous research that has focused on how supportive organizational situations might spur employees' subsequent resilience levels (e.g., Kuntz et al, ; Todt et al, ), as well as their personal initiative and innovative behaviour (Hong, Liao, Raub, & Han, ; Scott & Bruce, ). We focus instead on the concurrent influence of employees' resilience levels and different sources of workplace adversity on their disruptive creative behaviour.…”

“…Moreover, by affirming the hypothesized invigorating effects, we extend previous research that has focused on how supportive organizational situations might spur employees' subsequent resilience levels (e.g., Kuntz et al, 2017;Todt et al, 2018), as well as their personal initiative and innovative behaviour (Hong, Liao, Raub, & Han, 2016;Scott & Bruce, 1994). We focus instead on the concurrent influence of employees' resilience levels and different sources of workplace adversity on their disruptive creative behaviour.…”

“…Notably, previous research also indicates that a full model, such as Model 6, in which the signs of the interaction terms match those obtained when adding the interaction terms in separate questions provides evidence for the robustness of the results (Covin et al, 2006;De Clercq, Dimov, & Thongpapanl, 2010), as in this study. 1 Finally, even if the theoretical focus of this study is on the concurrent interplay of employees' resilience and different resource-draining work conditions for explaining disruptive creative behaviour, we also performed a post hoc analysis to account for possible causal relationships among these variables, in light of findings that employees' resilience levels might depend on their surrounding organizational environment (Kuntz, Malinen, & Näswall, 2017;Todt, Weiss, & Hoegl, 2018). In particular, we ran different path models, corresponding with the regression models in Table 2, to estimate the covariances among resilience and the three adverse work conditions (work overload, organizational rigidity and organizational politics).…”

Employee resilience: considering both the social side and the economic side of leader-follower exchanges in conjunction with the dark side of followers’ personality

“…We extend current knowledge about factors that play a role in developing resilience. Specifically, by focusing on resilience as a dynamic characteristic, we provide substance to the upcoming discussion of resilience as a state rather than a relatively stable trait variable (Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016;Kuntz, Connell, & N€ aswall, 2017;Kuntz, Malinen, & N€ aswall, 2017). Furthermore, by explicitly addressing and testing for linear and non-linear interactions between SLMX and ELMX, we empirically substantiate the idea that opposing LMX approaches do not necessarily exclude each other (Goodwin et al, 2009;Kuvaas et al, 2012).…”

“…resilient, and demonstrate positive adaptation to their fate. Building upon this reasoning, recent research increasingly postulates that resilience is a capability that can be developed over time (Kuntz, Connell et al, 2017;Kuntz, Malinen et al, 2017;Stokes et al, 2018). Given appropriate organizational stimuli such as (transformational) leadership (e.g.…”