Resilience in the Workplace: A Multilevel Review and Synthesis

Abstract

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.

Paradoxical leadership in public sector organisations: Its role in fostering employee resilience

“…Identified organisational antecedents include social support (Lamb & Cogan, ), feedback and a positive organisational context (Kuntz et al., ), a knowledge sharing culture (Malik & Garg, ), and transformational leadership (Harland, Harrison, Jones, & Reiter‐Palmon, ). To our knowledge, however, studies have not looked at employee resilience in the public sector context, have not explored the role of PL in that context, and have not assessed POS as an antecedent of employee resilience (Hartmann, Weiss, Newman, & Hoegl, ). This matters, as leadership that does not match the demands on public services, and their employees, may hinder resilience.…”

Understanding How Resilience is Measured in the Organizational Sciences

“…We searched for relevant resilience measures using PsycINFO and Google Scholar with the Boolean search terms (resilience or resiliency and measure) and (resilience or resiliency and scale). We also examined the measures included in previous review articles (e.g., Harms et al, 2018;Hartmann et al, 2019;Windle et al, 2011). Measures were included if they were (1) publicly available (in the spirit of open science, so that everyone can access the items), (2) published in English, and (3) relevant to the working adult population (e.g., measures for children or adolescents were excluded).…”

“…Other resilience measures exist (e.g., Dispositional Resilience Scale; Bartone, Ursano, Wright, & Ingraham, 1989;Global Assessment Tool;Peterson, Park, & Castro, 2011;Workplace Resilience Instrument;Mallak & Yildiz, 2016;Workplace Resilience Inventory;McLarnon & Rothstein, 2013), 1 and certainly new measures will be developed in the future. However, we believed that we had a reasonable and representative set of items to proceed usefully with these 14 measures, for multiple reasons: (a) these measures are in popular use by researchers (see Hartmann et al, 2019 for a review) and readily accessible by the 1 The Dispositional Resilience Scale (DRS; Bartone et al, 1989) is a well-known and commonly used resilience measure (although not mentioned in Hartmann et al, 2019). We did not initially include the DRS, because despite the name of the scale, the items are based on concepts of hardiness and designed to capture the three dispositional tendencies of hardinesscommitment, control, and challengeas defined by Maddi and Kobasa (1984).…”

“…As such, organizational science researchers and practitioners have become increasingly interested in the understanding, measurement, and improvement of resilience (Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016;Linnenluecke, 2017) examining how resilience can improve processes and outcomes in the workplace and how individuals, teams, and organizations can build their capacity for resilience. However, as with any complex, multilevel, and dynamic phenomena, workplace resilience comes with a wide array of research promises and challenges (Britt et al, 2016;Hartmann, Weiss, Newman, & Hoegl, 2019;King et al, 2016).…”

“…The importance of item-level analyses in resilience measurement Recent research has begun to provide needed insights into the current state of resilience measurement. Hartmann et al (2019) provide a review of workplace resilience literature, discussing research on existing resilience measures, antecedents of resilience (e.g., personality traits and cultural value orientation, personal resources, personal attitudes and mind-sets, personal emotions, work demands and resources), and outcomes of resilience (performance, mental and physical health, work-related attitudes, change-related attitudes). Windle, Bennett, and Noyes (2011) also reviewed the reliability and validity of several existing resilience measures, in addition to the theoretical bases and item selection processes underlying the measures.…”