Resilience in Public Sector Managers

Abstract

This study discusses the concept of employee resilience (ER), defined as the capability to use resources to continually adapt and flourish at work, even when faced with challenging circumstances. The concept is grounded in positive psychology and conservation of resources (COR) theory and complements other concepts such as coping which describe employees and managers adapting to challenge and change. This study validates a scale of ER and examines attributes and job factors associated with heightened ER in public sector line managers. Study results show that heightened ER is associated with public service motivation (PSM), employees’ pro-social skills and constructive leadership by supervisors. ER is also associated with a climate for innovation. Theoretical and practical implications for strengthening employees’ resilience in public organizations are discussed.

Public Employee Use of Social Media at Work: Competency, Collaboration, and Communication of Workplace Policy

“…Furthermore, organizational social media policy has just begun to receive scholarly attention; it is mainly used as a mediator in existing studies (Chen et al, 2020). Regarding outcome variables, this study explored the impact of social media usage on collaborative and resource-seeking behaviors as well as perceptions toward termination fairness and procedural justice, both of which have gained attention in recent studies on employee resilience (Franken et al, 2020; Kim et al, 2022; Plimmer et al, 2021). While most existing studies have focused on general variables such as work performance, job satisfaction, work engagement, job burnout, and work motivation (Chen et al, 2020), this study clarifies how employee social media use can lead to distinct individual opportunities and challenges, which in turn influence employee engagement and collaboration, and ultimately, organizational outcomes.…”

“…This investigation adopted questions from Olmstead et al (2016) and Carlson et al (2016) to evaluate whether social media information affected their opinions of colleagues. To analyze the association between social media competency and positive organizational behavior ( H1 ), the survey asked how much they agree with the following statements, modified from the survey items by Plimmer et al (2021), Näswall et al (2019), and Franken et al (2020): “I effectively collaborate with others to handle unexpected challenges at work” (collaborative behavior) and “I seek assistance and resources when I need them at work” (resource-seeking behavior)—these dimensions of collaborative and resource-seeking behaviors imply that employees try to involve others in efforts, which is often identified as collaborative competency (Getha-Taylor, 2008). As these two items were measured on an ordinal scale (5-scale Likert-type measure), this study used an ordered logistics model.…”

Stressed out public servants? Testing the stress appraisal of psychological and emotional stressors on stress reactions through psychological capital

“…This is a worrying trend. As a result, psychological capabilities such as resilience are important to teach to younger public servants so they can cope with job stressors (Plimmer et al. , 2021).…”

Building people up: Growth‐oriented leadership in the public sector

“…We consider such actions to be momentary behaviours, in which processes are ‘actions intertwined with the dynamics of time’ (Saldaña, 2016, p. 111) and are therefore longer term. Third, it examines how GOL behaviours foster three employee behaviours: network leveraging, learning, and adapting, which in turn help employees gain further skills and gain other resources (Plimmer et al., 2021), such as social capital. These employee behaviours are taken from a contemporary conceptualisation of employee resilience, which construes resilience as not just bouncing back from a crisis, but also growing and flourishing in response to day to day challenges (Näswall et al., 2019).…”