Keeping Positive and Building Strength

Abstract

During an organizational crisis in health care, we collected multilevel data from 426 team members and 52 leaders. The results of hierarchical linear modeling describe the influence of leader behavior on team members' resilience, which is primarily through affective mechanisms. Specifically, transformational leadership was associated with greater levels of positive affect and lower levels of negative affect, which in turn predicted higher resilience among team members. Inverse effects were found for the passive form of management-by-exception (MBE) leadership. Contrary to expectation, no relationship was found between active MBE leadership and affect. The implications for leaders and team members to foster positive affect and resilience during a crisis are discussed.

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

“…These studies argue that relationships at work can be an important source of strength, offer support, and hence increase individual resilience. Examples of factors that are studied in this respect are: support from others (Meneghel, Borgogni, Miraglia, Salanova, & Martinez, 2016;Jensen, Trollope-Kumar, Waters, & Everson, 2008), relationship with the supervisor (Peters & Pearce, 2012) and transformational leadership (Harland et al, 2005;Sommer, Howell, & Hadley, 2016). In general, these prior findings demonstrate the importance of high-quality relations between employees and their supervisor for employee well-being and resilience.…”

“…For example, in a qualitative study about early career teacher resilience, Peters and Pearce (2012) found that the relationship with principals has a large influence (negative and positive) on teachers' feelings of personal and professional well-being. A quantitative study among health care teams by Sommer et al (2016) establishes the positive influence of transformational leadership on team members' resilience. Similarly, Kuntz, Connell, et al (2017) found that the availability of support and feedback was positively related to individual resilient behaviour.…”

Organizational resilience: Nonprofit organizations’ response to change

“…The second was the commitment to the organization as an extension of employees' personal value systems. According to the theory of transformational leadership, when an organizational leader taps into individuals' morals and values and engages them in a collective vision, a lasting, sustainable transformation is created, which is characteristic of a resilient organization [31,32].…”

“…In these organizations, hope and optimism appeared to be how organizational members made sense of change, informed their responses, and contributed to resilience [32]. This framework resulted in organizational members who were cognitively prepared to adapt to the many changes that affected the organizations.…”

Understanding Positivity Within Dynamic Team Interactions

“…If team leaders and/or team members themselves can coordinate their interaction processes to increase their own and others' positive energy, they might also increase efforts in subsequent team activities. Such upward spirals might lead not only to improved team performance but also to team members' greater well-being (e.g., Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005;Sommer, Howell, & Hadley, 2015).…”