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Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Exploring Theoretical Foundations for Understanding Employee Resilience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2016

Kate M. Conley ,
Malissa A. Clark ,
Olivia H. Vande Griek  and
Jay A. Mancini
Kate M. Conley*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Georgia
Malissa A. Clark
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Georgia
Olivia H. Vande Griek
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Georgia
Jay A. Mancini
Affiliation:
Department of Human Development and Family Science, University of Georgia
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kate M. Conley, Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) provide a summary of the conceptual confusion surrounding the construct of resilience as well as several key recommendations for spurring future organizational research on resilience. However, we feel that two key points were not adequately addressed in the focal article. First, we argue that we cannot fully understand the concept of resilience or apply it in our field of organizational studies without first understanding its fundamental theoretical groundings. Many of these underlying theoretical foundations on resilience were founded in and advanced through 50+ years of theory and research on family resilience literature; however, many of these perspectives were not addressed in the focal article. In this commentary, we outline and provide contextualized examples of how to apply one of the most widely used and empirically supported theoretical models of resilience—the ABC-X model (Hill, 1958)—to the work domain. Using the ABC-X model as a starting framework, we then highlight several additional theoretical perspectives that can inform research on employee resilience: Masten's (2001) ordinary magic, Antonovsky's (1979) sense of coherence, and Walsh's (2003) focus on strengths.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 491 - 497
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2016 

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