Resilience development process of Sri Lankan employees in response to polyadversity

Abstract

Resilience has gained traction among scholars and practitioners in the organisational domain in the recent past, as it facilitates organisations as well as individuals to overcome adversities. The process conceptualisation of resilience asserts that resilience is a product of resources utilised and mechanisms enacted by individuals in response to various adversities. This study aimed at exploring the resilience development process of the employees in business organisations in Sri Lanka, in response to the mandated working from home [MWFH] during the Covid-19 pandemic. MWFH is regarded as a polyadversity that initially emerged as an acute adversity, which later transformed to a chronic adversity, due to its prolonged nature. Currently available research on resilience development processes explores either the resilience process or mechanisms, thus fail to capture the interplay between resilience resources and mechanisms towards fostering resilience. This qualitative study which is part of a larger study on employee resilience, adopted an interpretivist research philosophy. Participants included 28 employees, who demonstrated high level of resilience in adapting to the polyadversity, identified through a survey conducted as part of a larger research project on workplace resilience. Data were analysed manually using Thematic Analysis. Communication Theory of Resilience and Integrative Resilience Model for Employees, were jointly used as the theoretical lenses of the study. The resources utilised by the participants included: personal resource (e.g., personality), work resources (e.g., revising organisational policies), family resources (e.g., support to vent emotions), social resource (e.g., sourcing of supplies), community resources (e.g., membership in new online communities) and energy resource (e.g., natural energies). Utilising these resources, participants revealed they enacted five mechanisms: crafting normalcy, affirming identity anchors, legitimizing negative feelings while foregrounding positive actions, putting alternative logics to work, and crafting and/or maintaining communication networks. The study identified resilience of employees in adapting to a polyadversity that they were forced into, without prior preparation. This research advances the current understandings on workplace resilience through many novel contributions. To our knowledge this is one of the very first studies that examines both resilience resources and mechanism in a single study, deploying a robust mechanism to identify participants who precisely demonstrated high level of resilience in ascertaining their resilience development process. Limitations and future research directions are provided.