Building Resilience for Success

A Resource for Managers and Organizations

C. Cooper, J. Flint-Taylor, M. Pearn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137367839
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Resilience is a word that is used in many different ways in different contexts, this new and innovative book focuses on psychological resilience in the workplace, examining other key aspects such as physical health and resilient teams, drawing from the latest research and the authors own practical experience.

PART 1

UNDERSTANDING RESILIENCE

CHAPTER 1

“THE INDIVIDUAL”— A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING PERSONAL RESILIENCE

RESILIENCE RISKS AND STRENGTHS—FROM RISK MANAGEMENT TO CAPACITY-BUILDING

To understand individual differences in resilience, we need to move beyond the working definition set out in the Introduction, and look at some of the other ways this complex concept has been defined and researched. Traditionally, resilience has been studied from the angle of providing therapeutic support for people who are experiencing difficulty in coping with crisis, bereavement, or life in general. In seeking to understand why some people cope better than others, much of this work has focused on the development of resilience in childhood and adolescence.

Lately, more attention has been paid to studying resilience in adulthood, and also to resilience-building as an asset or strength, rather than as a solution to a crisis or problem. Evidence is also mounting for the view that resilience may even be the norm and that people in general are more resilient than earlier studies may have indicated. George Bonanno suggests that resilience, rather than collapse and recovery, is the most common outcome from traumatic events.¹ He also makes the useful and important distinction between resilience in coping with long-term problems or “corrosive” environments on the one hand, and resilience to isolated events on the other.

These more recent lines of investigation are particularly relevant to our aim of integrating resilience-building with broader programs to improve employee well-being and business performance, because they help to normalize the idea of resilience development and take it outside the “white coat” context of illness, therapy, and crisis management.

THE CHALLENGE OF DEFINING RESILIENCE

One thing everyone agrees on is the lack of a common definition of resilience. Indeed, it is not unusual to read several different definitions within the same book or article (such as the handbook by John Reich and his colleagues; see box²).

Definitions and descriptions of personal resilience from contributors to the Handbook of Adult Resilience (2010)

“ ... resilience is best defined as an outcome of successful adaptation to adversity. Characteristics of the person and situation may identify resilient processes, but only if they lead to healthier outcomes following stressful circumstances.” (Zautra and others, p. 4)

“Resilience has numerous meanings in prior research, but generally refers to a pattern of functioning indicative of ‘positive adaptation’ in the context of ‘risk’ or adversity.” (Ong and others p. 82)

“Resilience is a term psychologists use to refer to people’s ability to cope with and find meaning in ... stressful life events, in which individuals must respond with healthy intellectual functioning and supportive social relationships (Richardson, 2002).” (Mayer and Faber, p. 95)

“Resilience refers to individual differences or life experiences that help people to cope positively with adversity, make them better able to deal with stress in the future, and confer protection from the development of mental disorders under stress (Richardson, 2002).” (Skodol p. 113)

“Resilience is a broad concept that generally refers to positive adaptation in any kind of dynamic system that comes under challenge or threat.” (Masten and Obradović, 2008)

“Human resilience refers to the processes or patterns of positive adaptation and development in the context of significant threats to an individual’s life or function.” (Masten and Wright, p. 215)

There is even debate about whether resilience should be seen as an outcome, a process, or a set of characteristics, and this divergence of opinion is reflected in some of the common measures of resilience. Some researchers use the term “resilience” to differentiate the “process” from the “personal characteristics,” which they call “resiliency.” Others, however, use only one of these terms, or use both interchangeably.

Other influential definitions follow:

■Resilience is “the phenomenon that some individuals have a relatively good outcome despite suffering risk experiences that would be expected to bring about serious sequelae.”³

■“The construct of resilience refers to the ability of individuals to adapt successfully in the face of acute stress, trauma, or chronic adversity, maintaining or rapidly regaining psychological well-being and physiological homeostasis.”⁴

■“Psychological resilience refers to effective coping and adaptation although faced with loss, hardship, or adversity.”⁵

■“Resilience is the process of negotiating, managing and adapting to significant sources of stress or trauma.”⁶

The multiplicity of definitions can be confusing and lacking in rigor from an academic point of view, but for practitioners they can also help to provide a richer understanding of the diverse perspectives and insights in the field. As psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman suggest in their book on character strengths and virtues, resilience is not a unitary construct and is probably best seen as an umbrella term.⁷ This is how we have chosen to use the term “resilience” throughout the book—in other words, we do not restrict its use to any specific academic construct.

Our umbrella view is reflected in the broad, working definition we presented in the Introduction: resilience is being able to bounce back from setbacks and to keep going in the face of tough demands and difficult circumstances, including the enduring strength that builds from coping well with challenging or stressful events. Our description deliberately emphasizes the process and outcome aspects of resilience. We see personality and other individual characteristics, along with external circumstances and events, as the predictive factors that explain why some people display better coping and more resilient outcomes than others. Our view on individual characteristics as the factors that underpin resilience is developed throughout this chapter.

The “four waves” of resilience research

In summarizing the academic research on resilience, Ann Masten and Margaret Wright⁸ refer to “four waves of resilience research.” The first wave focused on describing, defining, and measuring resilience, and produced highly consistent findings in terms of the characteristics of individuals, relationships, and resources that predicted resilience (if not in terms of how resilience should be defined!). The second wave looked at the processes through which resilience develops, with the third wave seeking to apply an understanding of these processes to design resilience-building interventions.

The fourth wave combines the insights and methods of different fields including psychology, genetics, neurobehavioral development, and statistics. It also, as noted above, focuses more than previously on the positive, strength-building aspects of resilience. For the organizational practitioner, such an approach is very welcome as it facilitates the promotion of resilience development in a context where remedial interventions tend to be treated with suspicion or relegated to the domain of occupational health.

What, then, do we know about the predictors of resilience? From the study of resilience in childhood, the following have emerged as the critical factors: relationships (particularly early parent–child relationships), individual capabilities (including problem-solving ability, self-motivation, self-control, and optimism/positive belief), and cultural influences. Cultural influence refers to the potentially protective role of cultural or religious beliefs and practices. For example, despite a range of socioeconomic and other pressures affecting Hispanics living in the United States, physical health outcomes for this group are often equal to or better than non-Hispanic Caucasian Americans.⁹ This is an important reminder to take cultural differences into account when planning and implementing a resilience-building intervention in the workplace.

Missing in the research literature, however, according to Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, “is any discussion about which protective factors are relevant for whom, under what stressful circumstances, and with respect to what desirable outcomes.”¹⁰ They suggest that any such connections are likely to be general rather than highly specific, but the important point in our view is that more account should be taken of contextual factors when seeking to help people evaluate and improve their personal resilience.

This is an issue we seek to address in our approach to resilience at work—through reference to a research-based framework of the main sources of workplace pressure and support.¹¹ Given the multi-dimensional nature of resilience, there is no doubt that different work pressures will affect each of us in different ways—based not only on our current situation but also on the network of protective factors that has set the foundation for our personal resilience. In any event, participants in a resilience development program are more likely to engage with and benefit from an evaluation of their own particular resilience strengths and risks if this analysis is set in the context of the typical challenges and pressures they are likely to face in the work environment.

RESILIENCE—INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS

The framework we use for understanding the sources of workplace pressure and support (“the Situation”) is described in the next chapter. Looking first at “the Individual” side of the equation, we turn to the question of what personal characteristics underpin or predict resilience. Table 1.1 gives an indication of the range of findings and perspectives on this issue. The conclusions presented in the table are drawn from studies that cover resilience development in childhood and adolescence, adult resilience, the genetic and biological determinants of resilience, sports performance, physical health, therapy and counseling, the management of organizational change, and other related topics.

In this book on individual resilience in the workplace, we do not go into detail on the biological, environmental, familial, or cultural factors that interact during childhood and adolescence to determine whether individuals demonstrate high or low levels of resilience in responding to the challenges of their work situation. Our focus is on helping to evaluate and develop the particular strengths that each person brings as an adult to the work situation, as well as the risks that each needs to manage in order to respond in a resilient way to pressures from work and home. For this we need to understand the interplay between the personal characteristics of employees, the main sources of workplace pressure and support, and the processes by which resilient outcomes are achieved (see Figure 1.1). This interplay is often referred to in the study of psychology as the interaction between the individual and the situation, and to help explore how it works we need a framework for describing the individual and one for describing the situation.

Table 1.1 Examples of individual characteristics found to be associated with resilience

FIGURE 1.1 Framework for understanding employees’ resilience to workplace pressures

As mentioned earlier, our framework for the work situation is a well-established and validated model of the main sources of workplace pressure and support (see next chapter). For the individual, we use the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality,¹⁸ with reference, as appropriate, to other constructs such as reasoning ability. In giving particular emphasis to personality we agree with John Mayer and Michael Faber’s view of personality as “the individual’s master psychological system [which] oversees and organizes mental subsystems, such as motives, thoughts and self-control.”¹⁹ This system is the product of the interaction of biolo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction—Setting the Scene
• PART 1   UNDERSTANDING RESILIENCE
• PART 2   BUILDING RESILIENCE
• PART 3   THE FUTURE OF RESILIENCE AND ITS ROLE IN ACHIEVING WIDER ORGANIZATIONAL OBJECTIVES
• Appendix I:   A Short Guide to Using This Book
• Appendix II:   Creating an Individual Resilience Plan
• Appendix III:   Core topics for Resilience-Building
• Notes
• Index