Personal resilience as a strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of workplace adversity: a literature review

Abstract

Title. Personal resilience as a strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of workplace adversity: a literature review Aim. This paper is a report of a literature review to explore the concept of personal resilience as a strategy for responding to workplace adversity and to identify strategies to enhance personal resilience in nurses. Background. Workplace adversity in nursing is associated with excessive workloads, lack of autonomy, bullying and violence and organizational issues such as restructuring, and has been associated with problems retaining nurses in the workforce. However, despite these difficulties many nurses choose to remain in nursing, and survive and even thrive despite a climate of workplace adversity. Data sources.The literature CINAHL, EBSCO, Medline and Pubmed databases were searched from 1996 to 2006 using the keywords 'resilience', 'resilience in nursing', and 'workplace adversity' together with 'nursing'. Papers in English were included. Findings. Resilience is the ability of an individual to positively adjust to adversity, and can be applied to building personal strengths in nurses through strategies such as: building positive and nurturing professional relationships; maintaining positivity; developing emotional insight; achieving life balance and spirituality; and, becoming more reflective. Conclusion. Our findings suggest that nurses can actively participate in the development and strengthening of their own personal resilience to reduce their vulnerability to workplace adversity and thus improve the overall healthcare setting. We recommend that resilience-building be incorporated into nursing education and that professional support should be encouraged through mentorship programmes outside nurses' immediate working environments.

Burnout and Resilience Among Nurses Practicing in High-Intensity Settings

“…65 Our finding that resilience is relatively constant over years of nursing experience suggests that cultivating the conditions of internal resilience to help nurses survive and thrive in high-intensity settings over time may be possible. 67 Our data show a moderate correlation between moral distress and burnout. As scores for moral distress increased, so too did emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, perhaps as a result of powerlessness or lack of control, as studies [68][69][70][71] on the perception of autonomy and nurse satisfaction have suggested.…”

What we know and do not know about organizational resilience

“…Louisot (2015) considers resilience as a main issue in Risk Management, and Jackson, Firtko, and Edenborough (2007) view resilience as a new way of thinking about risk. As systems and organizations cannot be designed to anticipate all possible risks (Fiksel, 2003), we need resilient organizations to deal with events that will have serious consequences, even when they have low probability of occurrence (Ambulkar, Blackhurst, Grawe, 2015;Dalziell & Mcmanus, 2004).…”

Measuring staff behavior towards clients with ID and challenging behavior: Further psychometric evaluation of the Staff-Client Interactive Behavior Inventory (SCIBI)

“…Noone and Hastings (2009) have demonstrated in their research on emotional acceptance and mindfulness that not only the emotional reactions themselves prove to be important, but also how staff is dealing with such emotions appears to be essential. Jackson, Firtko, and Edenborough (2007) showed that this kind of emotional insight and being more reflective was important for enhancing personal resilience, which motivated Willems et al to include (emotional) self-reflection as a second intrapersonal factor. Finally, Mitchell and Hastings (2001) found that staff often use adaptive coping strategies, such as planning and active coping when confronted with challenging behavior.…”