Resilience in the workplace: a multilevel review and synthesis

© 2019 International Association of Applied Psychology In an increasingly dynamic business environment, the concept of resilience is fundamental to understanding how employees successfully handle adversity. Yet, the operationalisation of the concept, the factors which lead to its development, and how and why it influences outcomes of interest to organisations are issues still under debate in the literature. In this article, we address these debates by undertaking a critical review of research on resilience in the workplace at both the individual and team levels. We pinpoint different conceptualisations of resilience and highlight how resilience has been measured in extant quantitative work. Further, we provide a systematic literature review of empirical work on the antecedents and outcomes of resilience at the individual and team levels, as well as conduct a review of work that has introduced resilience as a moderator or mediator. In doing so, we highlight theoretical approaches that have been adopted to study resilience in the workplace. Based on our review of the extant empirical work on resilience, we develop a roadmap for future research. In particular, we pinpoint relevant theoretical approaches that help us understand the mechanisms underlying the development and outcomes of resilience and highlight opportunities for empirical advancement of the literature.