Advancing Employee Resilience Research: Additional Thoughts

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) draw attention to issues in the psychological literature regarding how we define, assess, select for, and build employee resilience. We offer a handful of recommendations for complementing and expanding on these important issues. Specifically, we propose that research should include more common forms of workplace adversity, versus extreme and rare types of adversity; resilience should be assessed via objective multirater methodology rather than subjective self-report; because context is important when studying resilience, researchers should delineate the purposes of the research; resilience should be treated as a malleable rather than a fixed characteristic; and finally, the field would benefit from qualitative research in addition to quantitative research.