Silver Linings in the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Importance of Resilience

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is both a universal health calamity and a global economic and social crisis that impacted workers and workplaces around the world in a dramatic manner. However, there are employees that were able not only to recover from workplace adversities, but to grow and learn from those challenges, emerging stronger than before. We leverage conservation of resources theory to examine the extent to which resilience mitigates the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic. Resilient individuals are less likely to experience the pandemic’s negative impact in their work and personal lives and have the capacity to control and influence their changing work environment in a successful way. In times of uncertainty, employees’ personal growth initiative is a very important factor to guarantee the success of any contemporary organization. Using a time-lagged design, we found that more resilient individuals, faced with a threat, are the ones who engage more in job crafting and are also the ones who grow. On the other hand, less resilient individuals lack the resources to deal with a perceived threat, and are unable to activate job crafting behaviors nor grow.