EMPLOYEE RESILIENCE: DIRECTIONS FOR RESILIENCE DEVELOPMENT

Resilience in organizations denotes system agility and robustness, essential to survival and thriving in increasingly challenging contexts. Contemporary scholarship has acknowledged the relationship between employee resilience and organizational resilience. Yet interventions aimed at developing employee resilience tend to use stress and well-being as proxy resilience indicators, focusing primarily on individual rehabilitation or the development of personal resources. We argue that these interventions should also consider the development of organizational resources that ensure both the inherent and adaptive resilience of employees. This article introduces employee resilience as behavioral capability, signaled by adaptive, learning, and network-leveraging behaviors, and it discusses ways in which supportive organizational contexts enable the development and enactment of these behaviors. The article proposes a series of resilience-building initiatives, embedded in everyday practice, and elucidates how leading and organizing for the development of employee resilience contributes to improved well-being and performance.