Resilience as a Psychological Resource Capacity

Pranav Mishra
Indian Institute of Management Rohtak

In this article, importance of employee psychological reliance is evaluated in terms of

organizational change. Resilience is found to be positively related to employees
commitment (normative and affective) through state positive affect as mediating factor.
The two types of commitment to change were positively but differentially related to
behavioural and creative support for organisational change.

Introduction
Resilience has been defined as inherent
ability in individuals to face crisis, adapt to
change and move ahead despite of
challenges. This is a broad definition that
considers the relationship of resilience
with crisis on extreme level. However
increasingly resilience has been defined as
ability of individuals to deal with changes
in day to day working life, managing office
politics, accepting personal criticism. (In
The Failure-Tolerant Leader, Richard
Farson and Ralph Keyes). In this context
resilience must been seen alongside
treating such experiences positively. In
this article we review the relationship of
resilience as psychological resource
capacity in context of organisational
change.

Evaluation of existing literature

Empirical researches have established the
role of employees behaviour to
organisational change as important aspect
to be considered. Employees tend to
resist such change as they find it going
against their existing routines that were
essential in completion of important work.
They find the changing roles and the
additional workload that comes along

with it as burdening and exhausting (Beer,

Eisenstat, & Spector, 1990; Strebel, 1996).
Thus there is a tendency to be negative
towards such change making them
reluctant to accept support from their
leaders (e.g., Pollard, 2001; Schweiger &
DeNisi, 1991). This psychological resource
has been defined as a trait possessed by
people to face hardships and develop a
flexible attitude towards changing
responsibilities and expectations. (Block &
Kremen, 1996)
According to Herscovitch and Meyers
(2002) conceptualization, employees
commitment to change are result of
change in two different variables of
behaviour. One is normative commitment
to change and affective commitment to
change. Normative commitment takes
into account employees obligation
towards their organisation. Affective
commitment to change takes into account
employees desire to change based on his
perception of benefits he thereby
receives. Employees undergo through a
lot of stress during this transitioning
change in organisation, hence many
researchers have tried to find the various
key resources that can help employees
easily transition into the change and even
become committed to such change in a

positive way. Conservation of resources

theory states the importance of resources
to provide employees with mental energy
to go through the change while at same
time protecting themselves against factors
that go against positive behaviour.
Employees ability to recover from crisis
with minimal impact can help them
develop additional resources that can be
used for dealing with stressful situations
in future. Resilience can develop positive
thinking, lower psychological stress and
help them develop positive work attitude.
People who have developed or inherently
have high psychological resilience
resource capacity tend to experience
positive emotions that can help them
respond effectively to change. This results
from the fact that people identify and
value the positive emotions that they
experience and also their skills in
developing them. They have the ability to
control their negative emotions. Thus
their resilience capacity is so strongly
developed that they can overcome any
transitions,
crisis
by
effectively
undergoing positive experiences. This
makes them more committed to such
transitions. Thus the state positive affect
is a mediator towards influencing
employees commitment to change.
Researchers have identified employees
normative and affective commitment to
change as positively related to developing
behaviour support and creative support
for change. This commitment must
essentially be present in an employee if he
wants to continue working in the
organisation. It was found that normative
commitment was more important factor
than affective commitment in predicting
employees behaviour during change. Also
normative commitment has a positive
relationship to behavioural and creative
support for change

and a negative relationship to turnover.

This particular research has helped
highlight the importance of resilience as
resource capacity before organisational
change takes place. Hence it is consistent
with conservation of resources theory and
other theories that call for developing
resources before stress is encountered
due to change.( Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997;
Lazarus & Folkman,1984). This highlights
the importance of state positive affect in
converting the psychological resources
into behavioural attitudes. Thus it has
identified role of positive emotions in
helping employees transition into change.
In doing so this research has gone beyond
the tendency of past studies in attributing
negative feelings (Fugate et al., 2002;
Kiefer, 2005) in the process of transition
and thus is an important contribution
towards the literature

Implications for employees and OB

practioners
Employees psychological resource of
resilience tends to be positively related to
high work performance (Youssef &
Luthans, 2007). Employers can hire a
certain percentage of employees for their
ability to deal effectively with stress
coming from organisational change.
Employers can also develop training
programs to nurture this ability in their
employees and lay down frameworks to
socially support them (Bonanno, 2005;
Cornum, Matthews, & Seligman, 2011;
Masten & Reed, 2002 ). Especially those
high velocity industries that mostly have
a stressful work life can effectively make
use of such training programs
Along with training programs employers
can effectively engage in interventions
that can inculcate positive emotions and
develop state positive affect in context of
organisational change (Huy, 2002).

Managers can communicate positive

feelings in the way they interact, talk with
their employees. They can try to promote
activities that may create excitement
towards such change as emotions are
contagious in nature (Barsade, 2002)
Employees can also make sure that they
clearly understand their new roles and
responsibilities
in
the
changing
environment by actively engaging with
their managers. They must understand
the implications of the change on their
everyday life so that there is no sense of
unfounded fear. A clear strategy and plan
for future laid down by leadership team in
this transition phase can help employees
in better managing their work.

Critique
The above findings that have been
reported were done on the basis of
research and sampling of employees and
managers from single organisation. Hence
it is essential to make sure that findings
are replicated across organisations and
industries to effectively measure the
impact.
It is essential that these causal changes be
measured at various points of the
organisational change process. The
existing research was done several weeks
before the actual implementation of
change and they were conducted when
employees already came to know of such
change through announcements made by
their organisation. Thus this has a limiting
effect of measurement of resilience on
organisational change.
This research also did not take into
account the effect of other resources like
respect for employees on normative
commitment.

Conclusion

This research examined and supported

the importance of psychological resilience
as
resources
shaping
employees
attitudinal and behavioural reactions to
change. The research is also consistent
with theory of conservation of resources.
This has established that the developing
and nurturing such resource capacities
before the onset of organisational change
can help increase employees overall
commitment towards change while
maintaining continued organisational
membership into the future. In spite of
this, there is large space for further
research to consider additional resources
that can help in effectively evaluating
organisational change across industries,
geographies, cultures.

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