Measuring Resilience in Organizations: The Employee Resilience Scale

Abstract

Resilience, or the ability to “bounce back” after adversity (King, 2016; Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007), has become an important and popular topic to organizational researchers and practitioners alike. However, resilience research in the organizational sciences is still nascent, benefitting from questioning its foundations further. Specifically, multiple definitions of resilience have resulted in countless scales, to the detriment of developing a consistent body of research in this increasingly necessary area of study. Addressing these limitations, the current project describes the conceptual and psychometric development of the Employment Resilience Scale (ERS). Subject Matter Experts (N = 21) provided feedback on an initial pool of items, which were then pilot-tested on a subset of working adults (N = 29). In the final stage of this project, to be completed by June 2022, a large sample of working adults (N = 1,000) will be recruited via Prolific to assess and refine the psychometric properties of the scale via EFA (N = 500) and CFA (N=500). Through the improved multidimensional assessment of resilience via the ERS, researchers and practitioners alike will contribute to the AOM theme to “create a better world together” by enhancing employee resilience.