Past research purporting to study employee resilience suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity about both the resilience construct and the methodological designs that examine resilience without ensuring the occurrence of significant adversity. The overall goal of this article is to address our contemporary understanding of employee resilience and identify pathways for the future advancement of resilience research in the workplace. We first address conceptual definitions of resilience both inside and outside of industrial and organizational psychology and make the case that researchers have generally failed to document the experience of significant adversity when studying resilience in working populations. Next, we discuss methods used to examine resilience, with an emphasis on distinguishing the capacity for resilience and the demonstration of resilience. Representative research is then reviewed by examining self-reports of resilience or resilience-related traits along with research on resilient and nonresilient trajectories following significant adversity. We then briefly address the issues involved in selecting resilient employees and building resilience in employees. The article concludes with recommendations for future research studying resilience in the workplace, including documenting significant adversity among employees, assessing multiple outcomes, using longitudinal designs with theoretically supported time lags, broadening the study of resilience to people in occupations outside the military who may face significant adversity, and addressing the potential dark side of an emphasis on resilience.
This study assessed longitudinal and cross-sectional relationships between work-family conflict, positive spillover, and depression in a national sample of 234 dual-earner couples. The authors also assessed crossover effects (i.e., the transmission of emotions, affect, or stress from 1 member of a dyad to another) of work-family conflict and positive spillover on spouses' depression. Two general findings of the study were that (a) positive spillover has a stronger impact on depression than does work-family conflict, and (b) the effects of spouses' positive spillover were more strongly related to decreased depression than were the effects of one's own positive spillover. Significant longitudinal effects were related to the crossover of positive spillover on decreased spouse depression.
Workers bear a heavy share of the burden of how countries contend with COVID-19; they face numerous serious threats to their occupational health ranging from those associated with direct exposure to the virus to those reflecting the conflicts between work and family demands. Ten experts were invited to comment on occupational health issues unique to their areas of expertise. The topics include work-family issues, occupational health issues faced by emergency medical personnel, the transition to telework, discrimination against Asian-Americans, work stressors, presenteeism, the need for supportive supervision, safety concerns, economic stressors, and reminders of death at work. Their comments describe the nature of the occupational health concerns created by COVID-19 and discuss both unanswered research questions and recommendations to help organizations reduce the impacts of COVID-19 on workers.
Using cluster analyses, the authors obtained evidence for 4 of these profiles in an energy industry sample (N ϭ 970) and a sample of 345 employed college students. The authors labeled the clusters: allied (i.e., moderate affective and continuance commitment), free agents (moderate continuance commitment and low affective commitment), devoted (high affective and continuance commitment), and complacent (moderate affective and low continuance commitment). Using a subset of the employed student sample (n ϭ 148), the authors also found that the free agents received significantly poorer supervisor ratings of performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and antisocial behavior than any other group.
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