Taking Time Seriously as a Component of Employee Resilience

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) recommend that our understanding of resilience would be advanced by making its temporal nature explicit. As a dynamic process, resilience is historical and temporal. The animating adverse event(s) and the resilient response(s) are dynamic and unfold over time; they often unfold as trajectories. This notion of trajectories implies a dynamic process, one progressing from one response or adaptation to another. These “temporal processes are a bit of a black box in I-O research†(Britt et al., p. 394). What would an extension of Britt et al.’s recommendation that researchers explicitly integrate time or temporality look like? Fully acknowledging the importance of time in this model may suggest worthwhile future research and potential interventions.