Resilience In Workplace

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Resilience in the Workplace
Today’s business environment is facing more stressful situations than ever before. Organizations are faced with many decisions that can throw their employees into chaos or even cause them to become less productive. Especially if the organization needs to downsize their work force to survive in today’s economy. One of the factors that promise some support of helping businesses overcome this adversity is by having resilient employees.
There are many different definitions of resilience, but all have the same underlying premise. The definition that will be discussed in this paper is from Luthans (as cited in Youssef & Luthans, 2007, p. 778) who defined resilience as “the developable capacity to rebound or bounce back from adversity, conflict, and failure or even positive events, progress, and increased responsibility.” Resilience is not just genetics, but there is evidence to support that the possibility exists that it is teachable (Winwood, Colon, Psych, McEwen, & Psych, 2013, p. 1205). This data has been supported by additional researchers. Wilson and Ferch (Wilson & Ferch, 2005, p. 45) substantiated this data by supporting that resilience is reinforced by caring relationships among employees.
There are multiple components of being resilient. Winwood et al (Winwood et al., 2013, p. 1207) identified seven components of being resilient that they measured in their studies as: living authentically, finding one’s calling, maintaining perspective, managing stress, interacting cooperatively, staying healthy, and building networks. These are not the only components of being resilient. Flach (as cited in Wilson & Ferch, 2005, p. 48) has identified multiple facets of resilience, but five were discussed...

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...s could be a huge detriment to an organization over the course of time, especially during rough economic times.
There are some flaws in the research studies. None of the research studies looked at how leadership or management positions could facilitate increasing the resilience of their organization’s employees. However, Wilson and Ferch did mention how caring relationships enhanced resilience within the organization (Wilson & Ferch, 2005, p. 46). Another item that would need to be examined further is the lasting effect of employee resilience within an organization. Winwood et al mentioned within their research that a longitudinal study would need to be conducted to foresee the long lasting effects on the employee’s welfare and health as well as be used to develop specific interventions to help make employees more resilient (Winwood et al., 2013, pp. 1211-1212).

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