Team Resilience Research Articles

Toward a new conceptualization of resilience at work as a meta-construct?

Organizations of all kinds are faced with multiple demands for adaptation of increasing frequency and amplitude due to such factors as reorganizations, climate change, pandemics, and labor shortages. This new reality requires our organizations to anticipate, adjust, and demonstrate resilience. The study of resilience at work relies on the comprehension of how organizational systems, as well as their work collectives and members, manage to overcome adversity without suffering from irreversible damage. However, the study of this phenomenon of interest contains grey areas concerning both its definition, its conceptualization, and the dynamic processes that underlie it. This theoretical paper addresses these different issues by providing first, a conceptual content analysis of the most frequently used definitions and second, a new conceptualization of resilience at work as a resource, either individual or collective. Moreover, we suggest a multilevel, dynamic, and virtuous conceptual approach to resilience at work, relying on both bottom-up and top-down flows. Accordingly, we formulate different theoretical propositions upon which future empirical research can draw to analyze the relationships between individual, team, and organizational resilience. Building on a conservation of resources lens, we offer a novel contribution to the resilience in the workplace literature, by providing an integrative and multilevel theory of resilience at work that highlights both the processual and interpersonal nature of its emergence, and the organizational levers that can foster it.

Breakdowns in team resilience during aircraft landing due to mental model disconnects as identified through machine learning

Landing system in aviation is a representative sociotechnical system; such systems often require seamless teamwork among experts. Resilience is critical for the ability of a team to adapt to sudden changes, overcome challenges, and return to normalcy. However, team heterogeneity can result in cognitive misalignment, known as mental model disconnects (MMDs). MMDs can cause interaction conflcits, which compromise team resilience. This study aimed to use machine learning to identify breakdowns in team resilience during aircraft landing. The results showed that the MMDs in the terminal area had the greatest influence on missed approaches; in particular, the late intervention of air traffic controllers’ (ATCOs) in an improper landing state was the major breakdown identified. This result highlights the importance of ATCO initiative in preventing landing incidents. The mechanism was determined to be ineffective information dissemination in nonroutine scenarios, which unravels the necessity for improving future information systems.

Linking information systems team resilience to project management success

Team resilience is a critically essential contributor to team effectiveness. However, the impact of team resilience on project management success has been little studied. This article aims to investigate the influence of team resilience on project management success in the context of information system projects. Using a quantitative study, we show that there is a significant positive relationship between project team resilience and project management success. As a result of this finding, we stress the importance of developing actions to promote team resilience to increase the likelihood of project management success, particularly in unstable environments.

Team resilience building in response to co-founder exits

Founding teams often experience the exit of co-founders. To develop theory about how founding teams deal with adversity emerging from the exit of one of their members, we take a team-resilience perspective and study the development of six founding teams. Our inductive model highlights how founding teams take different trajectories following team member exits, leading to different types of psychological closure, which impact the teams' resilience building. Our model also suggests how teams not engaging in distancing from the exit-related adversity experience additional adversity within the continuing team, eventually leading to team failure. Our findings challenge and extend extant studies on exits in founding teams and team resilience.

Justice Fosters the Effect of Team-Building Interventions on Viability and Performance

Building viable teams provides a sustainable organizational culture and supports efforts to overcome challenges and maintain a long-lasting and growing business. This study analyzed the role of organizational distributive justice on the relationship between team-building interventions and team viability, alongside team performance. As we understand the underlying concepts of viability and performance better, we can build more resilient teams. An empirical study was conducted on a sample of 402 employees in different teams in organizations. A research model was built with viability and performance as the dependent variables and team-building as the independent variable. The perception of distributive justice was the mediator. Team-building was measured by four variables, where the results of the factor analysis suggested that problem-solving and interpersonal relationships converged into one variable, whereas goal-setting and role clarification represented the second factor of team-building. Regression and mediation analysis showed that problem-solving and interpersonal relationships had a stronger influence on teams’ viability and performance. More remarkably, distributive justice mediated this strong relationship. Throughout the challenging business environment, improving the problem-solving abilities of our teams and encouraging them to build strong interpersonal relationships integrated with a perception of justice would improve the teams’ sustainability significantly. Independent of the strength of the relationship between the team-building factors of viability and performance, organizational distributive justice fosters performance and sustainability. The observed influence of distributive justice was stronger on the goal-setting and role clarification components, whereas direct effects were relatively weaker. The high correlation between team viability and performance should encourage leaders to give equal importance to these concepts when building and motivating their teams, measuring the outcomes, and taking necessary actions.

Supporting Relational, Trauma-Informed Social Care Work with Autistic Adults: Evaluation of a Reflective Supervision Group Pilot

Abstract There is a growing body of literature highlighting the need for reflective supervision to support the often complex and challenging practice of social care workers. The current study aimed to explore an Irish social care team’s experience of a pilot reflective supervision group. The study participants were six male social care workers supporting autistic adults in the community. The team met for four one-monthly group supervision sessions, facilitated by an external supervisor. A reflective, relational approach was taken to the supervisory work, using role-play, free association and the Seven-Eyed model of supervision. At the end of the four-month pilot, participants completed a brief questionnaire to evaluate the supervision group experience. Thematic analysis of the participants’ open responses revealed the following themes: (i) increased insight/empathy; (ii) experiential learning; (iii) enhanced awareness/skills in relational practice; (iv) personal resilience; (v) team resilience; and (vi) emotional challenges. The study results suggest the potential importance of reflective supervision in boosting resilience, motivation and emotional insight when supporting people with unique relational needs.

Adversity and Team Resilience

Adversity and Team Resilience

Team Structure for Tough Cookies: Team Resilience in Creative Teams

Team Structure for Tough Cookies: Team Resilience in Creative Teams

Self- vs. Team-Preserving Responses in Extreme Contexts and the Demonstration of Team Resilience

Self- vs. Team-Preserving Responses in Extreme Contexts and the Demonstration of Team Resilience

Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects.

The resilience of a healthcare system hinges on the adaptability of its teams. Thus far, healthcare teams have relied on well-defined scopes of practice to fulfill their safety mandate. While this feature has proven effective when dealing with stable situations, when it comes to disruptive events, healthcare teams find themselves navigating a fine balance between safety and resilience. Therefore, a better understanding of how the safety vs resilience trade-off varies under different circumstances is necessary if we are to promote and better train for resilience in modern healthcare teams. In this paper, we aim to bring awareness to the sociobiology analogy that healthcare teams might find useful during moments when safety and adaptability have the potential to conflict. Three principles underpin the sociobiology analogy: communication, decentralization, and plasticity. Of particular interest in this paper is plasticity whereby swapping roles or tasks becomes an adaptive, rather than a maladaptive, response teams could embrace when facing disruptive situations. While plasticity has naturally evolved in social insects, infusing plasticity in healthcare teams requires intentional training. Inspired by the sociobiology analogy, such training must value the ability: a) to read each other's cues and miscues, b) to step aside when others had the necessary skills, even if outside their scope, c) to deviate from protocols, and d) to foster cross-training. If the goal is to increase a team's behavioural flexibility and boost their resilience, this training mindset should become second nature.

Offender Management: Reducing hazards and building resilience

This article examines the psychological impact of working in a multi-agency team managing registered sexual and violent offenders. A review of the nature of the role and data collected from psychological surveillance identifies personal and work-related hazard and resilience factors. The study found that much of the variance in anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and secondary trauma could be predicted by the psychological surveillance survey's resilience and hazard measures; each mental health condition had a different set of predictors with some common features. The findings are a first step towards increasing the resilience of multi-agency offender management teams with suggestions for reducing hazards and improving individual and team resilience. These findings can help reduce the mental health problems experienced by offender managers working with registered sexual and violent offenders in prisons, probation and policing.

Why and How to Become a More Resilient Leader

Why do some healthcare leaders, teams, and organizations falter during and after a crisis, while others adapt and grow even stronger? The answer lies in their resilience, a complex, multi-faceted topic involving numerous domains and mediating factors. This article explores what it means to be a resilient leader and the typical behaviors that resilient leaders demonstrate to their employees. It offers 25 practical strategies that leaders can use to become more resilient. This article then suggests how leaders may be able to overcome the typical obstacles to their resilience, including their own neurobiology and a number of psychosocial, developmental, and environmental factors. It describes how leaders can build more resilient healthcare organizations by strengthening commitment, routines, rules, and improvisation. Finally, this article offers 12 strategies leaders can use to build more resilient teams.

Team Resilience under Shock: An Empirical Analysis of GitHub Repositories during Early COVID-19 Pandemic

While many organizations have shifted to working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, how the remote workforce and the remote teams are influenced by and would respond to this and future shocks remain largely unknown. Software developers have relied on remote collaborations long before the pandemic, working in virtual teams (GitHub repositories). The dynamics of these repositories through the pandemic provide a unique opportunity to understand how remote teams react under shock. This work presents a systematic analysis. We measure the overall effect of the early pandemic on public GitHub repositories by comparing their sizes and productivity with the counterfactual outcomes forecasted as if there were no pandemic. We find that the productivity level and the number of active members of these teams vary significantly during different periods of the pandemic. We then conduct a finer-grained investigation and study the heterogeneous effects of the shock on individual teams. We find that the resilience of a team is highly correlated to certain properties of the team before the pandemic. Through a bootstrapped regression analysis, we reveal which types of teams are robust or fragile to the shock.

A cross-sectional study of clinical emergency department nurses’ occupational stress, job involvement and team resilience

IntroductionThe occupational stress of clinical nurses has drawn increasing attention. It has been proven that occupational stress is related to job involvement, and job involvement affects team resilience. However, research on the relationship between emergency nurses’ occupational stress, job involvement and team resilience is lacking. AimTo explore relationships between occupational stress, job involvement, and team resilience among a sample of emergency nurses and determined significant influencing factors of occupational stress in emergency departments. MethodsIn four hospitals in Shandong, China, 187 emergency room nurses participated in a study. The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, the Chinese version of the Stressors Scale for Emergency Nurses, and a scale for evaluating the team resilience of medical professionals were used to collect data. ResultsThe overall occupational stress score of nurses working in the emergency departments in Shandong province was 81.07 ± 25.80. The results of Single-factor analysis demonstrated that the scores indicating the occupational stress for emergency nurses differed significantly with respect to age, education level, marital status, children, professional title, work experience and work shift (P < 0.05). Additionally, there is a negative correlation between job involvement and team resilience and occupational stress. Multiple linear regression results showed that the job involvement, team resilience and work shift were statistically significant influencing factors of the level of occupational stress (change R2 = 17.5 %, F = 5.386, P < 0.001). ConclusionsStronger team resilience and more active job involvement resulted in lower occupational stress levels experienced by emergency nurses.

The business case for ransomware exercises for business and technology teams

Ransomware attacks are increasing in complexity, scope and frequency. These attacks have had mounting impacts on critical global infrastructures and populations, with significant financial ramifications. This paper underscores the business case for the investment and execution of preparedness efforts to increase the readiness and resilience of business and technology teams. It begins by exploring the present characteristics of ransomware and the landscape of organisational preparedness, as described in various reports cataloguing current and forecasted trends in the field. This is supported by a commentary on recent noteworthy ransomware attacks. Emergency management, crisis management and general business development strategies are then merged to inform and offer actionable solutions for immediate implementation. The paper describes a systematic approach that provides opportunities to embed ransomware preparedness efforts into broader organisational strategies and goals. The business case concludes that investment in ransomware exercises offers additional benefits to organisations and companies, including employee retention and goal attainment.

Navigating team resilience: A video observation of an elite yacht racing crew

AbstractIn this paper, we take a process perspective to inductively theorize how shifting sources of adversity and subjective experiences of team relationship quality influence team resilience across time. Building on the literature, we characterize team resilience as a set of team‐level processes—anticipation, coping, and learning—which can support teams to work interdependently to return to, or beyond, pre‐adversity levels of performance. Despite the rising interest, existing research has tended to be theoretical or exploratory in relation to sources of everyday team adversity. To further understand team resilience, we examine how the characteristics of team resilience unfold across time between a crew of sailors during a challenging multi‐day yacht race and competitive demands. Using video observations and interview data, we explore in real‐time how team resilience processes are (i) shaped by dynamism in the sources of external (environmental) adversity and internal team adversity encountered and (ii) influenced by shifts in the subjective experience of team relationship quality across time. We make two contributions: a novel conceptualization of how external (environmental) adversity and internal team adversity affect team resilience processes across time and a theorization of how relationship quality affects team resilience in the context of shifting adversities.

Teamwork execution and team resilience: A multistudy examination of reciprocal and longitudinal relationships.

Teamwork execution and team resilience: A multistudy examination of reciprocal and longitudinal relationships.

When resilience is cliche and resilience resources are taboo: how language and policies exacerbate mental health disparities.

Over the past few years, our team's resilience research has expanded from populations of adolescents with serious illness to health-care workers burnt out from the COVID-19 pandemic, women sexually harassed in the workplace, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) youth struggling with poor mental health, and patients experiencing racism in health care and society. In each group, we hear the same thing: “Stop calling me ‘resilient’ and fix the problems.”

The association between team resilience and team performance in nurses during COVID-19 pandemic: a network analysis

BackgroundCompared to other healthcare workers, nurses are more vulnerable to the potentially devastating effects of pandemic-related stressors. Studies have not yet investigated the deeper characteristics of the relationship between team resilience and team performance among nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to elucidate the characteristics of team resilience and performance networks among nurses during the pandemic.MethodsA cross-sectional study involving 118 nursing teams comprising 1627 practice nurses from four tertiary-A and secondary-A hospitals in Shandong Province, China, was conducted. Analyzing and Developing Adaptability and Performance in Teams to Enhance Resilience Scale and the Team Effectiveness Scale were used to measure team resilience and performance, respectively. The estimation of the network model and calculation of related metrics, network stability and accuracy, and network comparison tests were performed using R 4.0.2.ResultsNode monitoring had the highest centralities in the team resilience and performance network model, followed by node anticipation, cooperation satisfaction, and cooperation with other departments. Moreover, node cooperation satisfaction and learning had the highest levels of bridge centrality in the entire network.ConclusionMonitoring, anticipation, cooperation satisfaction, cooperation with other departments, and learning constituted core variables maintaining the team resilience-performance network structure of nurses during the pandemic. Clinical interventions targeting core variables may be effective in maintaining or promoting both team resilience and performance in this population.

Building Individual and Team Resilience: A Neuropsychiatric and Social Perspective

There is increasing evidence that a modern healthcare workforce needs to be increasingly resilient to cope with difficult situations. This attention to resilience in the healthcare team is an area that requires further exploration and development. From the wider literature on personal resilience, professional resilience appears to be more than "not burning out", it involves positive adaptation and developing personal resources. This session will address ways in which to bridge the knowledge gap in understanding the neurobiology of resiliency, and for healthcare team members, review of the mechanisms involved in developing and increasing both personal and professional resiliency.The session will be broken down into 3 parts:First, a review of the neurological anatomy and physiology involved, and then insights into the neurobiological mechanisms underlying resilience. This concept is based on a neuroplastic process model, which will be discussed.Second, for the development of personal resilience, the focus will be on optimism, patience, mindfulness, supportive relationships, available resources, work-life boundary setting, self-development, and growth. These areas are steppingstones to the intentional development of thoughts and behaviors that change the neuroplasticity of the brain. and lead to your physical brain changing to reinforce the skill.Third, for the development of the professional team resilience, the focus will be on interprofessional group dynamics and the process of identifying adverse workplace challenges, such as organizational issues in the current healthcare sector.