Resilience training for critical situation management. An umbrella and a systematic literature review

Abstract

The literature on resilience training (RT) mainly focuses on long-term personal hardship, and sees resilience as a general capacity that can be applied regardless the context. However, this view of resilience is unsatisfactory when it comes to the effective management of critical situations (e.g. the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015, or the Fukushima nuclear accident). Approaches such as Resilience Engineering (RE) see resilience as a property of a system, but their focus on systemic resilience makes application to training individuals difficult. This systematic literature review addresses these issues by parsing RT interventions that prepare professionals to develop a situated capability to resist and efficiently react to critical situations in their work. Twenty-one articles were evaluated in terms of their conceptualisation of resilience, intervention characteristics, study characteristics, and outcomes. We identified five types of RT: preparedness training, stress inoculation training, personal efficacy training, RE training, and team resilience training. The five types of RT can be categorised in an individual-oriented and system-oriented perspective. We argue that neither of these perspectives provide professionals with sufficient tools to effectively respond to critical situations. To bring RT in safety-related domains forward, we suggest that future research (1) seeks conceptual advancements of resilience as a 4E capability (enacted, embodied, embedded, extended), (2) investigates training interventions from a Vocational Education and Training perspective, and (3) embraces a cross-disciplinary approach to resilience and provides empirical data with ecological validity that contribute to enhancing cross-disciplinary resilience.