Resilience is the ability of a person or an organization to resist adverse events. This paper examines the relationship between individual and team resilience. The three mediators that were chosen to examine the relationship between individual and team resilience in more detail are "meaning and purpose", "self-awareness" and "psychological response to stress". The three mediators were chosen because, at first glance, they are not the most intuitive variables to expect in linking individual and team resilience and because there is not yet adequate research related to the variables. In the proposed cross-sectional study, the authors use scales that are established in science to measure the different variables. This paper contributes to the research field of resilience through the theoretical analysis and in addition through the proposal of a study for future research. In the paper it is hypothesized that meaning and purpose, self-awareness and psychological response to stress mediate the relationship between individual resilience (IR) and team resilience (TR). The importance and relevance of the proposed study is discussed at the end of the paper.
Paths to Team Resilience: The Relationship between Individual and Team Resilience
Alexander Mai
Keywords
Individual resilience, team resilience, stress, self-awareness, meaning and purpose
Abstract
Resilience is the ability of a person or an organization to resist adverse events. This paper examines the relationship between individual and team resilience. The three mediators that were chosen to examine the relationship between individual and team resilience in more detail are "meaning and purpose", "self-awareness" and "psychological response to stress". The three mediators were chosen because, at first glance, they are not the most intuitive variables to expect in linking individual and team resilience and because there is not yet adequate research related to the variables. In the proposed cross-sectional study, the authors use scales that are established in science to measure the different variables. This paper contributes to the research field of resilience through the theoretical analysis and in addition through the proposal of a study for future research. In the paper it is hypothesized that meaning and purpose, self-awareness and psychological response to stress mediate the relationship between individual resilience (IR) and team resilience (TR). The importance and relevance of the proposed study is discussed at the end of the paper.
Introduction
Resilience is a term that has been used more and more frequently in the last decade. The demands in today's society, not only in the private, but especially in the business environment, are continuously increasing. Therefore, it will be more and more important now and in the near future to take care of oneself. Taking care of oneself also means learning to deal with adversity and setbacks and not to break down because of them, which builds the bridge to resilience.
Since the term 'resilience' is still relatively new compared to other research areas - even though the term was first used in psychology in the 1970s - there are still numerous gaps in research. While resilience of an individual is increasingly becoming the focus of scientific research and numerous studies are therefore already available, the aspect of team resilience is almost completely left out. Science shows that there is a link between individual resilience (IR) and team resilience (TR), but to what extent the two variables interact is mostly unknown. Many researchers agree that having a group of resilient team members is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for team resilience to arise (e.g., Alliger et al., 2015; Bowers et al., 2017). This makes the relationship between the two variables even more interesting, considering that the sum of individual resilience should most obviously describe the resilience of a group.
Hartwig et al. (2020) state in their systematic review on team resilience that there is a research gap regarding the explanation of the relationship between individual and team resilience.
Therefore, this paper is dedicated to explaining the relationship between individual and team resilience, focusing on one particular gap in research. The three variables that can be observed in individually resilient people and were chosen by the authors of the paper will be considered and explained in more detail at a later stage. It is assumed that these variables function as mediators between individual resilience (IR) and team resilience (TR).
After extensively reviewing the current state of research regarding individual and team resilience, the authors also encountered proven methods for measuring the various variables. The design of the study will be in the form of various surveys that can be considered reputable and widely used to measure the variables in this scientific field. The scales that will be used are listed in figure 2 and will be discussed in more detail in the section “Method”. First, a theoretical basis is established with the definition of the different terms and variables, in order to then be able to go into more detail about the design of the study.
Individual Resilience
The concept of individual resilience has been studied and discussed during the past decades. An estimated 80% of the articles about resilience appeared since the late 1990s (Schaap, et. al., 2007), and most of the research focuses on the individual level of analysis (King et al., 2016). Thus, it has been described as a complex, dynamic and multi-dimensional phenomenon (Waugh, 2014).
The term is utilized in different disciplines, for instance in literature concerning ecology, microbiology, engineering, business and economics. Furthermore, most of the literature about resilience was found in the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry (Earvolino-Ramirez, 2007), conceptualizing it as a personality trait, a state-like developable capacity and a process (Kossek & Perrigino, 2016; Richardson, 2002).
From the workplace perspective, the theory of resilience has been built on ideas of positive psychology, with a focus on positive human strengths (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Luthans, 2002). It has mostly been studied in the contexts of general business organizations, healthcare and the military sector, and applied at different levels of analysis. Nevertheless, it has only begun to attract the attention of organizational behavior researchers and is an underresearched topic in this area (Steger, 2009).
One of the definitions that has received the most significant attention in the psychological field defines resilience as “the ability to bounce back or cope successfully despite substantial adversity” (Rutter, 1985).
In the literature, two main elements are always considered while talking about resilience, that distinguishes it from any other personality trait, capacity or process. The first element is adversity, in the form of challenge, change, or disruption. Disruption is the component that allows an individual to learn or tap into resilient qualities and achieve resilient reintegration (Richardson, 2002). This reintegration is then connected with the second element, which is the adaptation, where the individual returns to the initial state of wellbeing or performance, after experiencing adversity.
The protective factors that function as characteristics or behaviors of resilient individuals have also been studied by several authors, being the main ones the ability to rebound and reintegrate, high expectancy and self-determination, positive social support, flexibility, sense of humor, self-esteem and self-efficacy (Earvolino-Ramirez, 2007).
Several scales have been developed to measure resilience at the individual level in the workplace, but since there is no comparability among them and no consensus among researchers on how to measure it because of the different conceptualizations of the term and the lack of specification they depend on (trait, capacity or process), it may be challenging to continue with advancement in this field. (Hartmann et. al., 2020).
The importance of Individual resilience in the workplace lies on its outcomes, categorized as performance, mental and physical health, work-related attitudes and change-related attitudes (Hartmann et. al., 2020).
Furthermore, dealing with high levels of stress at the workplace has negative personal and performance outcomes. These consequences can be anxiety, depression, fatigue and burnout, and the reduction of work performance (Figley, 1995). Thus, the individuals that are less affected by these levels of stress have been defined as resilient individuals.
Team resilience
In the work environment you can observe the trend of work intensification, that employees are facing high pressures at work. Teams operating under time pressure, high customer expectations and stretched working hours are faced with a high level of occupational stress. This can probably cause team conflicts, decrease team satisfaction or reduce team morale. Workplace adversity can include events with a small impact on performance (e.g., project setbacks) or high impact occurrences that lead to chronic stressors (e.g., high job demands). These events vary from the employee’s personal life events as they need task-specific skills to manage these stressors effectively (Sharma & Sharma, 2016). While some teams are able to recover quickly and even thrive after facing difficulties, other teams will display reduced results and suffer loss of cohesion as a team. A crucially important construct in this context is team resilience, which has gained more interest by scholars and practitioners in the recent years (King et al., 2016; West et al., 2009).
In scholars there is no commonly agreed upon definition of team resilience. Some authors describe it as a character trait, that lays in the individual team members, other see it as a process. However, the definition by West, Patera and Carsten is promoted in literature. Therefore, team resilience is defined as the teams “capacity to bounce back from failure, setbacks, conflicts, or any other threat to wellbeing that they may experience” (West et al., 2009). This definition focusses on the inputs that are already existing within the team. There is a second definition within literature by Morgan et al. (2013), which extended resilience research in sport psychology, that is modified frequently. They defined team resilience as “a dynamic, psychosocial process which protects a group of individuals from the potential negative effect of stressors they collectively encounter. It consists of processes whereby team members use their individual and collective resource to positively adapt when they experience adversity” (Morgen et al., 2013). This definition explains team resilience as a process by which teams deal with stressors they experience as a group among individual team members. Furthermore, it covers processes in which team members use their individual resources to adapt successfully to experienced adversity and therefore improve their performance (Morgan et al., 2013). Bennett et al. (2010) stated that “resilience may be viewed as much a social factor existing in teams as an individual trait”. According to his statement, team members have a collective capacity that helps them to adjust positively to their environment. Therefore, team resilience is also seen as a teams’ capacity to protect the team members from the stressors that they encounter (Sharma & Sharma, 2016).
In contrast to the definition of individual resilience as the return to wellbeing after experiencing risks that threated mental health, the functioning of team resilience can be characterized best by the ability to reflect the previous level of team effectiveness because of adversity (Gucciardi et al., 2018). As a result of the primarily purpose of teams to follow a common goal, when measuring the outcome of team resilience, it can be focused on the teams’ performance. These performance outcomes are mostly operationalized through indicators of efficiency (e.g., the needed time to reach the tasks), effectiveness (e.g., sale numbers), quality of work (e.g., efficiency of collaboration) or through quantity of work (e.g., workload efficiency). Further, these team outcomes are marked by the extent to which the members’ needs are satisfied and to which degree members are willing to remain in their team. Organization should measure the effectiveness of its teams as it contributes to the performance of the organization (Gucciardi et al., 2018).
The literature on resilience has strengthened the need to manifest resilience in different ways at team level (Flint-Taylor & Davda, 2013; Morgan et al., 2013). As mentioned, team resilience is a team level capacity that can protect the individuals of the group from the common stressors they are facing. In this context, the individual level of each team member’s resilience characteristics is important to keep a high level of productivity during turbulent times and to recover better (Cooper, 2013; Morgen et al., 2013). Resilience has been found as one of the core constructs that leads to a positive organizational behavior (Lufthans, 2002). Therefore, several meta-analyses and reviews with focus on resilience in organizational context have been performed in recent years. To mention a few, Linnenluecke (2017) identifies five different streams of research that explore resilience in and of organizations by using bibliographic mapping. In the same year, Williams, Gruber, Sutcliffe, Shepherd and Zhao (2017) elaborated on the connection between organizational resilience and crisis management and Kuntz, Malinen and Näswall (2017) focused on the development of employee resilience as a behavioral capability. Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman and Klieger (2016) studied different conceptualizations of employees’ resilience as well as of resilience-building programs. Moreover, Vanhove, Herian, Perez, Harms and Lester (2016) examined the effectiveness of resilience-building programs in organizations. Moreover, researchers have stressed that the teams who have a broader perspective are able to adopt learning orientation when they meet adversities. (Bennett et al., 2010; West et al., 2009). In addition, research proves that individuals who are described as resilient, will stay emotionally and physically healthy while facing adversity (Cooper, 2013; Morgen et al., 2013). Adverse events can disrupt team activities and lead to losses of team processes, but resilient teams are more likely to resist against major disruptions (Hartwig et al., 2020).
Although there have been some first attempts to characterize the construct of resilience in the workplace, unfortunately important questions are still unanswered since some variables that are related to resilience at the workplace are not fully considered. On the one side research is unclear whether resilience is an outcome, a mediator or moderator or an antecedent at different levels of the investigation. On the other side, prior literature has only a few attempts to approach resilience at the team level (Hartmann et al., 2020). The lack for a better understanding of resilience at a team level also has been stressed in scholars (Alliger et al., 2015, King et al., 2016, Stoverink et al., 2018). It can be stated that the overall majority of research in the field of resilience in the workplace puts the individual level of analysis in the center (Hartmann et al., 2020). There are just a few attempts to build a connection between individual and team resilience. In doing so, some scholars have drawn to the job demands-resource theory to find out to what degree resilience reduces harmful impacts of job demands in adversity. They argue that individual resilience as a personal resource can buffer negative impacts of demands in a group (Hartmann et al., 2020). Kozlowski and Klein (2000) suggest that resilient team members do not automatically develop a resilient team but still that the collaboration of resilient team members leads to a shared perception of their teams’ resilience.
Despite the growing importance for team resilience, there is a lack of a reliable measure in literature. Several researchers and scholars have developed frameworks to measure resilience at an organizational level. Popular ones are for example the Dispositional Resilience Scale-15 (DRS- 15; Winwood, Colon & McEven, 2013), the Resilience Scale (RS; Wagnild & Young, 1993), the Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA; Friborg et al., 2005) and the Resilience at Work scale (RAW; Winwood, Colon & McEven, 2013) (Sharma & Sharma, 2016). In several empirical studies that measured team resilience, it was adopted as a shared team capacity. What stands out most is that most authors usually use individual resilience measures and make alterations into a team context (Blatt, 2009; West et al., 2009; Molenaar, 2010). Hartmann et al. (2020), stresses that current measurement instruments are unlikely to fully capture the social nature of team resilience. They suggest that measurement scales should rather consider the nature of a team construct.
Research on the antecedents of resilience at the individual level found certain mediators that play a role for resilience in the workplace. Beginning with personality traits, empirical research suggests that some personality traits are positively linked to resilience such as conscientiousness which was found to have a positive correlation since conscientious people are seen as more organized, which can help to deal with adversity (Wei & Taormina, 2014). A second relationship that has been found is scholars are personal resources, such as self-efficacy. The authors mention that team members who have a high self-efficacy feel able to respond to work challenges in a positive way and develop a feeling of control over a situation, which makes them more resistant (Guo et al., 2017; Lyons et al., 2015). Another finding in research is the link between work-life balance and resilience, since people can use social contacts in their leisure time as resources. This is also in line with the conservation of resources theory by Hobfoll (1989) (Jensen et al., 2008). A strong link has been found between social competencies such as emotional intelligence and the employees resilience. The capacity to build healthy relationships at workplace is positively related to resilience (Stephens et al., 2013). Researchers also begun to look at the link between leadership styles and employees’ resilience. They found that a transformational leadership style is positively associated with employees’ resilience since transformational leaders can foster resilience among team members (Sommer et al., 2016). Since some variables have already been found to mediate between individual and team resilience, in the following three variables that play an important role at a team level, will be looked at. These variables have been mentioned in scholars in the context of individual resilience as well, but there not is not enough evidence yet that they function as a mediator.
[...]
- Arbeit zitieren
- Alexander Mai (Autor:in), 2021, Paths to Team Resilience. The Relationship between Individual and Team Resilience, München, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1297683
-
-
-
-
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
-
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
-
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
-
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
-
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
-
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
-
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
-
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen.