Constituting Resilience at Work: Maintaining Dialectics and Cultivating Dignity throughout a Worksite Closure

Abstract

Job insecurity—seen in practices like temporary work, furloughs, and site closures—is an ongoing reality for increasing numbers of workers. While the communicative constitution of resilience in situations of job loss has received significant attention, we know little about how resilience is constituted in the face of ongoing job insecurity. This study explores that question by considering how a group of employees enacted resilience during the 22-month period between the announcement that their worksite would close and the actual closure. Based on in-depth interviews, this study considers how soon-to-be terminated employees created and maintained resilience by (de)centering themselves, framing the future optimistically, affirming their value, keeping work in perspective, and caring for one another. These findings point to the importance of sensemaking that enabled employees to hold conflicting emotions and interpretations in tension and meaningfully enact purpose, agency, and humanity. Specifically, the analysis suggests that maintaining dialectics and cultivating dignity are important for constituting resilience. This study contributes to our understanding of the communicative constitution of resilience by offering a sixth central process—maintaining dialectics—to the communication theory of resilience and suggesting that workplace interactions that cultivate dignity enable resilience.

‘The Enabling Role of Internal Organizational Communication in Insider Threat Activity – Evidence From a High Security Organization’

“…Sensemaking is a cognitive process that occurs as individuals search for meaning around events and experiences particularly when events disrupt routine organizational functioning, such as crisis or insider threat cases (Brown et al, 2015; Kim, 2018). To employ sensemaking, therefore, means attending to how individuals enact contexts and select meanings from their environment (Wieland, 2020, p. 468). These selections can reveal perspectives on personalities, roles, power relations, and normative expectations that are critical for interpretive analysis.…”

Management Research Post-Covid-19 Pandemic

“…On the other hand, examples of exemplary leaders were successful in navigating through the crisis and managing the balance between various stakeholders (Lagowska, Sobral & Furtado, 2020). The new generation of business leaders shall require positive leadership traits like protecting employees, displaying 'bounded optimism', timely and transparent communication,' displaying self-sacrificing behaviors, and empathy (Wieland, 2020). The need for a transformational leadership style fostering superior positive relationships with subordinates, performance motivation, and commitment is the need of the future business organizations.…”

Life during furlough: Challenges to dignity from a changed employment status

“…Here, the most immediate dignity threat, a reduction in pay, could be accompanied by a lack of felt fairness (Laundon et al, 2019). The requirement to navigate job insecurity during furlough is also likely heightened in the context of a pandemic (Weiland, 2020). Furlough enacted unilaterally rather than through bilateral consultation may likewise threaten dignity as it undermines voice and participation both identified as central facets to experiencing workplace dignity (Hodson, 2001).…”