Team resilience emergence: Perspectives and experiences of military personnel selected for elite military training

Abstract

We conducted a longitudinal (3‐month) qualitative study to examine elite military personnel's (N = 32) experiences and perspectives of team resilience emergence following two team‐oriented training courses within an 18‐month high‐stakes training programme where personnel are required to operate in newly formed tactical teams for extended periods. Our thematically informed interpretations of the participants’ subjective experiences of reality were constructed according to five key themes: (i) adversity is an enduring, shared experience of an event; (ii) individuals recognise adversity through physiological and/or behavioural states; (iii) social resources bind together individual self‐regulatory capacities when confronted with adversity to support team functioning; (iv) shared experiences of adversity and collective structures strengthen social bonds and mental models needed for resilience emergence; and (v) behavioural processes and shared states are how collectives turn individual and team capacities into performance under adversity. These findings provide novel insights that supplement our current understanding of team resilience emergence, including the varying means by which adversity may be collectively experienced, synergies between specific forms of adversity and resilience processes or protective factors, and the unique influence of performance context (e.g., task type).

An integrated perspective on individual and team resilience: Moving from multilevel structure to cross‐level effects

“…Likely, due to calls to further explore previously understudied bottom‐up multilevel processes (Kozlowski et al, 2013), the majority of team resilience research has focused on some aspect of the emergence of resilience at the team level. Team resilience authors (e.g., Chapman et al, 2021; Gucciardi et al, 2018; Hartmann et al, 2020; Hartwig et al, 2020; Stoverink et al, 2020) have generally proposed that team resilience emerges via interactions between team members and resources following exposure to adverse events. In our view, the particular form of emergence for team resilience depends on the particular component in question (capacity, enactment, and demonstration).…”

“…As highlighted by Stoverink et al (2020, p. 401 To further illustrate, if a team faces the threat of missing an important deadline, team members may enact resilience by engaging in affective, behavioral, and cognitive coordination processes (Gucciardi et al, 2018) directed at meeting the team deadline. Yet, this means that resources for affective, behavioral, and cognitive self-regulation at the individual level (Chapman et al, 2021;McLarnon & Rothstein, 2013) will be temporarily depleted. This, in turn, creates strain-based conflict as the depletion associated with enacting resilience can lower, even if temporarily, individual capacity for resilience.…”

“…Research shows that capacity resources relevant to overcoming adversity at the individual and team levels often differ (Bowers et al, 2017), suggesting that resources originating from one level may not always be useful to enactment strategies for overcoming adversity at the other level. In addition, while an adverse event may affect the entire multilevel structure (i.e., the team and the individuals nested within it), that adversity may also manifest differently at different levels (Chapman et al, 2021; Morgeson et al, 2015). Because of this, qualitatively different enactment strategies may be needed at the individual and team levels.…”

“…Second, the nature of the adversity being faced is also likely to influence the proposed negative relationship between enacting resilience at one level and subsequent capacity at the other level. Much like manifestations of capacity resources, enactment strategies, and outcomes demonstrating resilience, adversity too can come in many different forms (e.g., Britt et al, 2016; Chapman et al, 2021; Hällgren et al, 2018; Isik, 2017; Lerman et al, 2020). Adverse events in the workplace can originate internally from sources such as organizational processes or health and safety risks as well as external conditions such as natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes; Isik, 2017).…”

The coping insights evident through self‐reflection on stressful military training events: Qualitative evidence from self‐reflection journals

“…The fourth author was consulted bi‐weekly to review coding. The involvement of multiple coders was intended to reduce bias associated with the coding process, as per other studies that have similarly used a deductive thematic approach (e.g., Anderson et al., 2016 ) and the ‘critical friend’ methodology in particular (e.g., Chapman et al., 2021 ).…”