No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Defining, measuring, and enhancing resilience for small groups
Abstract
Resilience is increasingly recognized as a factor that improves the functioning and performance of individuals and communities; however, it is underexamined in smaller groups or teams. We performed a comprehensive literature review to examine how resilience is defined, measured and used in small teams. Additionally, we evaluated the effectiveness of trainings or interventions on teams towards increasing unit resilience and performance. Following a literature review, 74 measures across 37 articles were assessed. Study eligibility criteria include English-language publications between 1980 and 2017 that included output from a research trial or survey on military or civilian groups pertaining to their resiliency to adverse events. Resilience of units/teams was assessed across the four phases of resilience defined by NAS: prepare, absorb, recover, adapt. Our review found that while the concept of resilience is not often studied in small groups empirically, the focus of available studies is on recovery with limited attention given to absorption and adaptation. This work reveals a potential mechanism to improve team/unit performance via unit resilience training and improved unit cohesion. Training had small but significant effects on the preparation (r = 0.03, k = 5) and recover (r = 0.05, k = 6) phases of unit resilience. In order to improve resilience in small groups, training programs and other interventions must be appropriately focused on the essential phases of resilience associated with mission execution.
... An organization's ability to provide resilience-focused training, directed at each organizational level (individual, team, organization) for the purpose of creating units of resilience amongst different levels, ensures the organization's preparedness, response and recovery amidst threats [16]. By providing targeted resilience training to their workforce, organizations can foster the work readiness and career resilience of their employees [17] thereby reducing workforce risks (e.g., attrition) by strategically investing in upskilling individuals to maximize resilience, agility and adaptability when faced with change [18]. ...
... While there are other organizational facets such as organizational structure and processes, design (artefacts) and the use of automation to build organizational adaptive capacities [19], this paper focuses specifically on organization-led training as an integral mechanism for fostering resilience. Training has the potential to not only enhance the career resilience of individuals in an organization [17]; it also helps to improve the specific organization's ability to prepare, absorb, recover and adapt to crises, across all organizational levels [16]. This need has become even more critical given the uncertainties associated with the emerging threats of environmental crises, talent shortages and low retention rates, thus requiring organizations to provide dedicated resources and training to enhance the resilience and protection of critical infrastructure. ...
... The macro level adopts a holistic approach, often encompassing external factors existing outside of the organization. These levels, whilst considered separate units, constellate to compose the organizational whole [16]. We note that some aspects of the macro environment (e.g., risks associated with the current COVID-19 pandemic) are often unforeseeable and uncontrollable, however through initiation of resilience-focused training, organizations can harness adaptive resilience capacity skills which in turn, enable them to successfully respond to such challenges [37]. ...
Resilience is a concept most commonly attributed to the capacity of a system to overcome perturbations by reinstating a previous stable steady state equilibrium or undergoing new trajectories. The concept of resilience has been increasingly applied and modified to address the problems faced in multiple disciplines, including; organizational studies, psychology and social science. Following the wide application of the concept, the interdisciplinary and multi-level formulations have been blurred, calling for research to explore the commonalities and differences of resilience across disciplines and levels. In this research, we aim to investigate the meaning of resilience, both in general terms and across organizational levels to identify these interdisciplinary and multi-level formulations. For this purpose, we adopt the steps from systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis approaches. Specifically, we argue that the interdisciplinary formulations of the concept of resilience is needed to further explore theoretical dimensions of the concept, while the multi-level formulations of the concept are required to further consolidate practice of organizing resilience. This research is the first step to explore and formulate the commonalities and differences of the concept of resilience across disciplines and levels.
... An organization's ability to provide resilience-focused training, directed at each organizational level (individual, team, organization) for the purpose of creating units of resilience amongst different levels, ensures the organization's preparedness, response and recovery amidst threats (Zemba et al. 2019). By providing targeted resilience training to their workforce, organizations can foster the work readiness and career resilience of their employees (Borg et al., 2021) thereby reducing workforce risks (e.g., attrition) by strategically investing in upskilling individuals to maximize resilience, agility and adaptability when faced with change (Cheese 2016). ...
... While there are other organizational facets such as organizational structure and processes, design (artefacts) and the use of automation to build organizational adaptive capacities (Hollnagel 2012), this paper focuses specifically on organization-led training as an integral mechanism for fostering resilience. Training has the potential to not only enhance the J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f career resilience of individuals in an organization (Borg et al. 2021); it also helps to improve the specific organization's ability to prepare, absorb, recover and adapt to crises, across all organizational levels (Zemba et al. 2019). This need has become even more critical given the uncertainties associated with the emerging threats of environmental crises, talent shortages and low retention rates, thus requiring organizations to provide dedicated resources and training to enhance the resilience and protection of critical infrastructure. ...
... The macro level adopts a holistic approach, often encompassing external factors existing outside of the organization. These levels, whilst considered separate units, constellate to compose the organizational whole (Zemba et al. 2019). We note that some aspects of the macro environment (e.g., risks associated with the current COVID-19 pandemic) are often unforeseeable and uncontrollable, however through initiation of resilience-focused training, organizations can harness adaptive resilience capacity skills which in turn, enable them to successfully respond to such challenges (Huang et al. 2020). ...
Following the broad application of the concept of resilience, the interdisciplinary and multi-level formulations have been blurred, calling for further research to explore the commonalities and differences of the concept across disciplines and organizational levels of analysis. In this research, we studied interdisciplinary formulations of the concept of resilience to explore how critical infrastructure workforce training to build resilience can be incorporated across individual employee (micro-level), team (meso-level) and organization (macro-level) levels. Informed by a systematic literature review and content analysis, an interdisciplinary and multi-level framework for resilience in the workplace was developed to guide organization-wide resilience training of critical infrastructure employees. This research can be used to inform practice by directing the focus of resilience training initiatives at each level. The paper's recommendations highlight the need for resilience training to focus on capacities and traits associated with anticipation in organizations to ensure the protection and resilience of critical infrastructure.
... An organization's ability to provide resilience-focused training, directed at each organizational level (individual, team, organization) for the purpose of creating units of resilience amongst different levels, ensures the organization's preparedness, response and recovery amidst threats [16]. By providing targeted resilience training to their workforce, organizations can foster the work readiness and career resilience of their employees [17] thereby reducing workforce risks (e.g., attrition) by strategically investing in upskilling individuals to maximize resilience, agility and adaptability when faced with change [18]. ...
... While there are other organizational facets such as organizational structure and processes, design (artefacts) and the use of automation to build organizational adaptive capacities [19], this paper focuses specifically on organization-led training as an integral mechanism for fostering resilience. Training has the potential to not only enhance the career resilience of individuals in an organization [17]; it also helps to improve the specific organization's ability to prepare, absorb, recover and adapt to crises, across all organizational levels [16]. This need has become even more critical given the uncertainties associated with the emerging threats of environmental crises, talent shortages and low retention rates, thus requiring organizations to provide dedicated resources and training to enhance the resilience and protection of critical infrastructure. ...
... The macro level adopts a holistic approach, often encompassing external factors existing outside of the organization. These levels, whilst considered separate units, constellate to compose the organizational whole [16]. We note that some aspects of the macro environment (e.g., risks associated with the current COVID-19 pandemic) are often unforeseeable and uncontrollable, however through initiation of resilience-focused training, organizations can harness adaptive resilience capacity skills which in turn, enable them to successfully respond to such challenges [37]. ...
Resilience is a concept most commonly attributed to the capacity of a system to overcome perturbations by reinstating a previous stable steady state equilibrium or undergoing new trajectories. The concept of resilience has been increasingly applied and modified to address the problems faced in multiple disciplines, including; organizational studies, psychology and social science. Following the wide application of the concept, the interdisciplinary and multi-level formulations have been blurred, calling for research to explore the commonalities and differences of resilience across disciplines and levels. In this research, we aim to investigate the meaning of resilience, both in general terms and across organizational levels to identify these interdisciplinary and multi-level formulations. For this purpose, we adopt the steps from systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis approaches. Specifically, we argue that the interdisciplinary formulations of the concept of resilience is needed to further explore theoretical dimensions of the concept, while the multi-level formulations of the concept are required to further consolidate practice of organizing resilience. This research is the first step to explore and formulate the commonalities and differences of the concept of resilience across disciplines and levels.
... Understanding the value of individual resources is imperative in developing resilient teams in all occupational settings, especially in the military, where organizational outcomes are directly related to the safety and well-being of individuals. Indeed, it is important to note that even though personal characteristics influence team resilience, these characteristics themselves do not account for the resiliency of a team (Gucciardi et al., 2018;Zemba et al., 2019) and should not be examined in isolation. Similarly, engaged leaders are key to the development of resilient teams (Mistry & Rosen, 2015;Sims & Adler, 2017). ...
... Team process or emergent states, such as team cohesion, trust, collective efficacy, and learning, are critical for team functioning and adaptability (Kozlowski & Bell, 2013) and have important implications for team resilience (Hartwig et al., 2020). These team features emerge from the interactions among team members, and their combined expertise, knowledge, skill, and efforts (West et al., 2009;Zemba et al., 2019). The systematic development of skills, career advancement, and learning opportunities of team members within the organization is essential for the development of resilience (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011;Stoverink et al., 2020). ...
Team resilience is a multidimensional, multi-level construct that is influenced by individual, team, and organizational factors. Current research indicates that team resilience enhances organizational outcomes, and potentially can contribute to efforts to enhance the well-being of individuals within the military. Despite a steadily growing literature, few studies have addressed the implications of team resilience in the military. The present monograph addresses the definition, measurement, and implications of team resilience for military personnel. Our review of the current literature indicates that theoretical models of team resilience have not been widely tested in military samples. Similarly, current assessments of team resilience have not been validated in military personnel. Finally, no formal training programs exist to target the development of team resilience in military personnel. Future studies would benefit from addressing these gaps in literature among different military populations (e.g., trainees, and reserve components) and if conducted appropriately could help inform targeted military appropriate interventions.
... The second trend recommends adopting a subjective approach that considers the perceptions, priorities, and values of populations and the severe constraints to which they are exposed [47,[55][56][57][58]. These analysis suggest that this form of research would allow grassroots populations to delineate the outcomes of the criteria they perceive to be necessary. ...
... These analysis suggest that this form of research would allow grassroots populations to delineate the outcomes of the criteria they perceive to be necessary. Therefore the subjective approach considers the participation of grassroots populations in making decisions about their future [58,59]. ...
This paper uses data from the survey of basic wellbeing indicators (2015) to investigate climate-related risk perceived impact on the household’s living standard in Togo. We investigate the data using a subjective approach with a Probit model and a Propensity Score Matching Method. For the majority of households in the sample, the results suggest, on the one hand, a significant impact of climate-related risk on their living standards. On the other hand, the estimation results show that income from activities increases the resilience and reduction of Togo households' climate-related effects. Finally, remittances increase the households' ability to be less climate vulnerable and play a significant role in the household’s resilience building. In terms of public policies, the results imply that a broader consultation and strategy are needed to reduce the consequences of climate related-risks on households in Togo.
... A lack of healthy conflict is a problem because it leads to a lack of commitment, which is another construct of the model under discussion. Essential competencies for embracing conflicts are, for example, active listening from all project team members, the need for team members to always give the benefit of the doubt before drawing negative conclusions, recognition of one's own weaknesses and mistakes, and apologizing and accepting apologies among project team members [62,63]. Thus, the following hypothesis: H5: Team resilience can be explained by Embrace conflicts. ...
... Throughout the analysis of how teams and their members adapt to adversity or to undesirable events, team resilience works as a predictor of its capacity to find out solutions. It is also a good predictor of how well teams are able to adapt, embrace sacrifices, re-prioritize plans and operational methods, and evaluate the right trade-offs of any situation [62,63]. Given this, it is useful to consider how our research's results can influence current understanding and how the new team resilience model can be used in practice. ...
Organizations need well-prepared teams to perform their projects with efficiency and effectiveness. In such socio-technical systems, project teams" capability to face and surpass difficulties play a critical role for the organizational reliability. Hence the relevance of studying project team resilience, defined here as the team's ability to deal with problems, overcome obstacles, and quickly recover from adverse and possibly harmful situations without collapsing. This paper presents an empirically-tested theoretical model for explaining team resilience. Results show that several factors such as Trust & Solidarity, Focus on results, Commitment, Management & Accountability, Embracing conflicts, Work conditions, and Skills & Behaviors are important contributors for team resilience. The findings discussed here contribute both to a better understanding of how project team resilience can be studied theoretically and improved in practice and to determine the triggers to ensure the proper adjustments to improve the overall organizational resilience and consequent reliability and performance.
... Few empirical studies have focused on the resilience of small groups or units, such as households [16]. The lack of fundamental information about household interactions with infrastructure services in disasters, and more specifically, how these interactions differ with respect to different population attributes. ...
... Certain infrastructure services cater more towards specific demographics, mainly communication services. The well-being of Households with older children (11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17) or no children was correlated more strongly to disruptions in communication services, in comparison to the Elderly and households with children under the age of 10 years. Research has shown that older adults are slower in adopting new technologies than younger adults [100]. ...
The objective of this paper is to empirically examine the impacts of infrastructure service disruptions on the well-being of vulnerable populations during disasters. There are limited studies that empirically evaluate the extent to which disruptions in infrastructure system services impact subpopulation groups differently and how these impacts relate to the wellbeing of households. Being able to systematically capture the differential experiences of sub-populations in a community due to infrastructure disruptions is necessary to highlight the differential needs and inequities that households have. In order to address this knowledge gap, this study derives an empirical relationship between sociodemographic factors of households and their subjective well-being impacts due to disruptions in various infrastructure services during and immediately after Hurricane Harvey. Statistical analysis driven by spearman-rank order correlations and fisher-z tests indicated significant disparities in well-being due to service disruptions among vulnerable population groups. The characterization of subjective well-being is used to explain to what extent infrastructure service disruptions influence different subpopulations. The results show that: (1) disruptions in transportation, solid waste, food, and water infrastructure services resulted in more significant well-being impact disparities as compared to electricity and communication services; (2) households identifying as Black and African American experienced well-being impact due to disruptions in food, transportation, and solid waste services; and (3) households were more likely to feel helpless, difficulty doing daily tasks and feeling distance from their community as a result of service disruptions. The findings present novel insights into understanding the role of infrastructure resilience in household well-being and highlights why it is so important to use approaches that consider various factors. Infrastructure resilience models tend to be monolithic. The results provide empirical and quantitative evidence of the inequalities in well-being impacts across various sub-populations. The research approach and findings enable a paradigm shift towards a more human-centric approach to infrastructure resilience.
... Klären, auf welche Resilienz-Phase im Umgang mit aversiven Situationen sich das Training bezieht. Zemba et al. (2019) empfehlen mit Blick auf Resilienzinterventionen für Teams, dass eine Reflektion der Phasen vorzunehmen ist, auf die sich das Training bezieht: Vorbereiten (auf spätere aversive Situationen), Absorbieren (auf die aversive Situation einlassen), Erholen (nach Abschluss der aversiven Situationen), Anpassen (zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt). ...
Resilienz meint, dass Menschen in grossen psychischen oder körperlichen Stresssituationen ihre psychische Gesundheit aufrechterhalten oder diese nach einer kurzen Phase von Belastungssymptomen rasch wiederherstellen können. Resilienz ist somit die Fähigkeit zur Aufrechterhaltung oder Wiederherstellung psychischer Gesundheit während oder nach stressvollen Lebensereignissen (https://lir-mainz.de/resilienz). Über eine systematische Analyse der vorhandenen, relevanten Reviews und Metaanalysen wird der aktuelle Stand der Forschung zu Interventionen, welche die Resilienz fördern sollen, in diesem Bericht zusammengefasst.
... Resilience engineering in the safety community [41], [42]. x Individual and team resilience: A critical review of the concept of individual psychological resilience [43]; factors shaping individual resilience to highstress environments [44]; review of 'team resilience' concepts in workplace context [45] and empirical study of influencing factors [46]; relationship of individual psychological resilience and organizational incentives [47]; describing and enhancing resilience of small groups [48] x Resilience of organizations (temporary and permanent): Theory and practice of resilience in project management [11], [49]; Organizational capabilities enabling recovery and disaster response [50]- [52], including business continuity [53], [54]; Review of 'organizational resilience' concepts, theoretical framing, and quantification approaches [55]- [60]; Capability to learn, adapt and transform [61], [62] x Resilience of supply chains and inter-organizational networks: Concepts and application of supply chain resilience [63]- [66]; Resilience of extended enterprises and industries [67], [68] x Resilience of social-ecological systems: 'unfamiliar, unexpected and extreme shocks' [69]; resilience, adaptability and transformability [70]; sustainability as long-term resilience, and resilience as a response to climate change [71]; general social-ecological resilience [72] x Precautionary principle as an application of resilience thinking in governance: ...
Early calls for environmental protection and sustainability centered on empathic arguments for curtailing consumerism and enacting personal and societal changes in our way of life. However we have now evolved to embrace a ‘technology fix’ approach, where we aim to reconcile our need to maintain our standard of living with our sustainability goals by developing and deploying ‘green technologies’ in our critical infrastructure at an unprecedented speed. While cost and sustainability are already in focus, the current discussion misses the third critical performance objective, resilience. In this paper, we explore how we can conceptualize resilience for critical socio-technical systems, and what the unresolved design challenges are to successfully develop and deploy them.
... We propose that future research may build on the definition provided and continue to draw from transdisciplinary sources for insight (Kabadayi and Tsiotsou, 2021), for example, safety science or military science, which investigates ways to enhance resilience in small groups or military units, and proposes mechanisms to improve unit performance via unit resilience training (Zemba et al., 2019). Scholarly work in these other fields can also help us better understand the factors that drive social resilience in consumers. ...
Purpose
This research aims to examine pathways for providers to facilitate social resilience in service communities to promote collective well-being and engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
Using abductive and metaphorical analysis, this study develops insights leveraging: the transdisciplinary field of molecular biology where 150 years of research demonstrates how cells build resilience through clustering together in a hostile environment; and case data collected with nonprofit service communities to help ground and elaborate upon the metaphorical analogues of cellular concepts.
Findings
This analysis uncovers the emergent processes of communal protection, communal adaptation and communal training within customer-to-customer service interactions. Findings identify novel drivers, such as the sharing of vulnerability markers and pre-training for community stressors, as well as pathways through which social resilience within service communities promotes habitual and transformative value, as well as collective well-being.
Practical implications
Service leaders can build upon the ideas in this research to understand the nature of social resilience and to intentionally design communal experiences and interactions that promote greater well-being and brand engagement.
Originality/value
The recent COVID-19 pandemic, along with the UN Development Goal for building a more resilient society, highlights the acute needs for a deeper understanding of social resilience. However, resilience-related research in marketing primarily focuses on individual-level coping. This research provides a deeper understanding of the drivers and outcomes of social resilience in service communities and offers a catalyst for future research on the topic.
... Recent studies have focused on understanding how individual members, teams, and organizations interact toward resilient outcomes (Ducheck et al., 2020;Stoverink et al., 2020). Zemba et al. (2019) provided a holistic examination of the literature on military teams and community-level resilience which resulted in the identification of key variables and activities which influence team resilience. People express resilience in the face of adversity, yet certain characteristics, physical expressions, spatial patterns, or overall predispositions and/or training allow certain individuals or teams to be far more successful in recovery and adaptation in the aftermath of disruption than others . ...
The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has impactśed all forms of global international engagement, inclusive of long-standing and recently formed research teams. Most were formed to be efficient within budget, time, and personnel limits, without building an ability to recover from crises, i.e. inherent resilience. Diversity and Inclusiveness, a requirement for resilient ecological systems, has only been discussed in a normative sense for teams of humans, including research teams. Studying different diversity configurations of international research teams will allow resilience-based tools and metrics to inform improved team design, implementation, and recovery to adverse events.
... The expression of both positive and negative emotions can help enhance resilience to stress due to their ability to help facilitate constructive solutions to problems, but only when all team members share in the burden of listening and comprehending negative expressions (Stephens and Carmeli 2016). Overall, unit cohesion, or cohesion with direct team members, has been linked to improved unit resilience and mental health resilience needed for team effectiveness (Brailey et al. 2007;Kanesarajah et al. 2016;Williams et al. 2016;McAndrew et al. 2017;Zemba et al. 2019). Therefore, autonomous systems could enhance the psychological well-being of team members to the degree that they fulfil their task commitments and help reduce the task load of other team members. ...
Cohesion is an important property of teams that can affect individual teammates and team outcomes. However, cohesion in teams that include autonomous systems as teammates is an underexplored topic. We examine the extant literature on cohesion in human teams, then build on that foundation to advance the understanding of cohesion in human–autonomy teams, both similarities and differences. We describe team cohesion, the various definitions, factors, dimensions and associated benefits and detriments. We discuss how that element may be affected when the team includes an autonomous teammate with each description. Finally, we identify specific factors of human–autonomy interaction that may be relevant to cohesion, then articulate future research questions critical to advancing science for effective human–autonomy teams. Relevance Statement: The human team literature has provided a foundation onto which human–autonomy team research can build, but the team dynamics, and subsequent states, established in multi-human teams are expected to differ in human–autonomy teams. This manuscript focuses on cohesion, one such state and synthesises elements of human team cohesion and human–autonomy interaction to detail expectations for cohesion in human–autonomy teams. These expectations can serve as a launch point for future research.
... Psychological resilience ( Shin et al., 2012 ;Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013 ) Team/Group -Project team or sub-discipline Team/Group resilience ( Zemba et al., 2019 ;Chapman et al., 2020 ) Project -Temporary organisation -Series of tasks and activities -Project processes -Project structure ...
Academic research and practice have been increasingly centered on the broad umbrella term of resilience, reflecting the desire to understand the ability of ecological, technological, and social systems to perform despite predictable and unknown changes. In this special issue, we will focus on the discourse around the concept of resilience within the discipline of project studies. This focus is based the increasing trend of abrupt and chronic changes in social, environmental, and technical systems around the world. Examples of these include acute shocks in the form of social unrest, political conflicts, natural hazards, pandemics, as well as chronic stressors like climate change, social justice, financial instabilities, housing affordability, and their cascading impacts. Most recent examples include the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that exposed a lack of resilience in established operations within societies at the global scale and the Australian Bushfires.
... robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, rapidity), which are inter-related through technical, organisational, and social aspects. These abilities encompass slightly different perspectives which jointly offer the opportunity to deal with micro-meso-macro level CIs' management (Bergström and Dekker 2014): from pure technical artefacts, towards social structures made up by small groups (Zemba et al. 2019), or large organisations . Resilience is relevant for management because it focuses on performance levels, as well as time and cost required to reach them (Vugrin et al. 2010b). ...
Modern societies are increasingly dependent on the proper functioning of critical infrastructures (CIs). CIs produce and distribute essential goods or services, as for power transmission systems, water treatment and distribution infrastructures, transportation systems, communication networks, nuclear power plants, and information technologies. Being resilient becomes a key property for CIs, which are constantly exposed to threats that can undermine safety, security, and business continuity. Nowadays, a variety of approaches exist in the context of CIs’ resilience research. This paper provides a state-of-the-art review on the approaches that have a complete qualitative dimension, or that can be used as entry points for semi-quantitative analyses. The study aims to uncover the usage of qualitative research methods through a systematic review based on PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). The paper identifies four principal dimensions of resilience referred to CIs (i.e., techno-centric, organisational, community, and urban) and discusses the related qualitative methods. Besides many studies being focused on energy and transportation systems, the literature review allows to observe that interviews and questionnaires are most frequently used to gather qualitative data, besides a high percentage of mixed-method research. The article aims to provide a synthesis of literature on qualitative methods used for resilience research in the domain of CIs, detailing lessons learned from such approaches to shed lights on best practices and identify possible future research directions.
... Additionally, benchmarks and thresholds are not consistent across studies. A complex systems perspective is necessary in order to address both upstream and downstream factors that impact life course resilience [13,[66][67][68][69][70]. ...
The care needs for aging adults are increasing burdens on health systems around the world. Efforts minimizing risk to improve quality of life and aging have proven moderately successful, but acute shocks and chronic stressors to an individual’s systemic physical and cognitive functions may accelerate their inevitable degradations. A framework for resilience to the challenges associated with aging is required to complement on-going risk reduction policies, programs and interventions. Studies measuring resilience among the elderly at the individual level have not produced a standard methodology. Moreover, resilience measurements need to incorporate external structural and system-level factors that determine the resources that adults can access while recovering from aging-related adversities. We use the National Academies of Science conceptualization of resilience for natural disasters to frame resilience for aging adults. This enables development of a generalized theory of resilience for different individual and structural contexts and populations, including a specific application to the COVID-19 pandemic.
... Researchers have undertaken various ways of operationalizing resilience, including as the capacity to adapt to challenges/stressors (Masten, 1994;Southwick et al., 2014), the trajectory of recovery following challenges (Bonanno, 2004;Zemba et al., 2019;Southwick et al., 2014), and foundational features that support access to resources in the community Panter-Brick, 2014). Resilience can encompass the dynamic process in response to challenges or adversity; the positive outcome of coping; and the potential capacity to mount adaptive responses to obtain desired outcomes. ...
In this paper, we discuss further advancements to the Multi-System Model of Resilience through examining empirical factor structures of the Multi-System Model of Resilience Inventory along with other measures of resilience. Evidence from multiple sampled populations provided support for the three-systems organization of the model and highlight its similarities and differences in relation to other measures of resilience. The MSMR conceptualizes resilience as a capacity that enables functioning across a continuum from vulnerability to resilience , whereby internal and external resources interface with dynamic coping processes in response to varying needs and goals. Meaningful applications of this model and future steps in model and measurement developments are discussed.
... They propose an alternative, more resilient approach based on self-organising. Other resilience focused PM research includes an examination of supply chain resilience in inter-organisational projects (Thom e et al., 2016;Naderpajouh et al., 2015); psychological resilience and wellbeing of leaders, communities, and small teams (Zemba et al., 2019) as well as individual project employees (Turner et al., 2019). A slightly more specialized sub-set of articles focuses on innovative (Oeij et al., 2017;Todt et al., 2019) and explorative projects (Wied et al., 2020), all dealing with the dilemma of flexible organising and creative manoeuvring. ...
Research communities across multiple disciplines have demonstrated an increasing concern about variations in the performance of social-ecological systems. In response to this concern, holistic research on resilience explores explanations for the performance of the systems under both predictable and unknown stressors and shocks. Embedded in broader systems, projects - which often involve a broad range of uncertainty and variability in performance outcomes - provide a fertile context in which to study resilience. On the other hand, projects involve temporary organising that is crucial in the extreme and changing contexts. In this essay, we frame a roadmap for the new theoretical domain of research at the intersection of resilience and projects. This framework intends to spark new research directions and can be used by scholars to investigate resilience at and across multiple levels-- individuals, groups/teams, projects, organisations, industries, and societies.
... Psychological resilience ( Shin et al., 2012 ;Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013 ) Team/Group -Project team or sub-discipline Team/Group resilience ( Zemba et al., 2019 ;Chapman et al., 2020 ) Project -Temporary organisation -Series of tasks and activities -Project processes -Project structure ...
Academic research and practice have been increasingly centered around the broad umbrella term of resilience, reflecting the desire to understand the ability of ecological, technological, and social systems to perform despite predictable and unknown changes. In this special issue, we will focus on the discourse around the concept of resilience within the discipline of project studies. This focus is based the increasing trend of abrupt and chronic changes in social, environmental, and technical systems around the world. Examples of these include acute shocks in the form of social unrest, political conflicts, natural hazards, pandemics, as well as chronic stressors like climate change, social justice, financial instabilities, housing affordability, and their cascading impacts. Most recent examples include the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that exposed a lack of resilience in established operations within societies at the global scale and the Australian Bushfires. There is a need for a paradigm shift on the concept of resilience within project studies. This special issue aims to instigate such a shift, soliciting interdisciplinary contributions from a range of domains of project studies across different levels of analysis, i.e., individual, teams/groups, projects, organisations, industry, and society. Contributions from broader but related disciplines within management, engineering, social sciences, natural sciences, or economics are welcomed as long as they touch on both topics of projects and resilience.
... We also know that resilience is a characteristic of high-functioning groups and organizations [46,47] and multiyear recovery efforts can involve interactions between small, ad hoc recovery teams and local municipal departments as well as multiple levels of government. These facts underline the importance of providing practical decision support tools to support the functioning of the teams directing recovery activities. ...
Globally, risk factors for population displacement due to major disasters are on the rise. These factors include the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, aging infrastructure, growing populations, and increasing urbanization. In cases of widespread damage, tools are needed to support complicated multiyear reconstruction efforts so that populations can return. We adapt the resilience matrix approach [1] as an organizing framework and resilience assessment tool to the problem of population displacement under conditions of damaged infrastructure. The resulting Population Resilience Matrix (PRM) links infrastructure reconstruction directly to the goal of reducing displacement due to infrastructure damage through performance metrics across the physical, social, information, and project management domains. This approach yields a summary of status and priorities that accounts for funding availability and the multi-phase recovery process. The PRM is applied to a synthetic extreme flood scenario, and includes detailed event-specific, locally relevant recovery assessment metrics. A practical approach to identifying the contributions of interdependent infrastructure systems to displacement is also outlined. The PRM is intended to support decision makers with coordinating roles, such as local disaster recovery managers. This approach is compatible with and complementary to US guidance on pre- and post-disaster planning and can also be applied internationally.
Military personnel are subject to more intense and more frequent stressors than the general population, and demonstrate higher rates of some mental illness. Resilience may be an important protective factor but is variably defined, and resilience-building interventions reflect variable approaches and produce mixed results. We aimed with this research to complement existing resilience-building strategies and interventions by contributing deeper understanding of how individuals in the Irish Defence Force (DF) experience and make meaning of resilience, through use of a qualitative and interpretative approach. The research question was: What is the meaning of resilience for DF members? Participants included six soldiers and research was carried out using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Developed themes described belief in pre-disposition toward resilience and perceptions of stigma associated with help-seeking for stress. Resilience was described as contagious among group members, suggesting the value of group resilience as a training strategy for military personnel.
The literature on resilience training (RT) mainly focuses on long-term personal hardship, and sees resilience as a general capacity that can be applied regardless the context. However, this view of resilience is unsatisfactory when it comes to the effective management of critical situations (e.g. the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015, or the Fukushima nuclear accident). Approaches such as Resilience Engineering (RE) see resilience as a property of a system, but their focus on systemic resilience makes application to training individuals difficult. This systematic literature review addresses these issues by parsing RT interventions that prepare professionals to develop a situated capability to resist and efficiently react to critical situations in their work. Twenty-one articles were evaluated in terms of their conceptualisation of resilience, intervention characteristics, study characteristics, and outcomes. We identified five types of RT: preparedness training, stress inoculation training, personal efficacy training, RE training, and team resilience training. The five types of RT can be categorised in an individual-oriented and system-oriented perspective. We argue that neither of these perspectives provide professionals with sufficient tools to effectively respond to critical situations. To bring RT in safety-related domains forward, we suggest that future research (1) seeks conceptual advancements of resilience as a 4E capability (enacted, embodied, embedded, extended), (2) investigates training interventions from a Vocational Education and Training perspective, and (3) embraces a cross-disciplinary approach to resilience and provides empirical data with ecological validity that contribute to enhancing cross-disciplinary resilience.
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.
Purpose
Organizations in today's changing environment face significant challenges, requiring continual innovation. Understanding oneself from the employee's perspective is paramount, especially in organizations and businesses, transforming all levels, accommodating new work paradigms and adapting to the post-pandemic business world. The authors examine the employees' critical dimensions, self-concept and resilience through self-reported studies to ascertain the impact on their performance in the organization. Self-concept, a multidimensional knowledge structure, implies the individual's description and examination, including psychological characteristics, attributes and skills. On the other hand, resilience is adapting appropriately to adversity, challenges and stressful situations and emerging unscathed. Resilience additionally leads to profound personal growth and acceptance of reality. It also endows the individual's sense of identity over time. It provides insights into work behavior and outcomes and fosters a positive psychological perspective to improve performance. Job performance is an observable individual performance that adds value and enables organizational goal achievement. To sum job performance is an achievement-related behavior. The research study examines the relationship between employee self-concept, resilience and performance elements (task, contextual and counterproductive work behavior).
Design/methodology/approach
Cross-sectional data were collected from 224 employees from the retail sector to test the hypotheses among self-concept, employee performance elements and resilience. SPSS 21.0 was used, and the authors conducted reliability, correlation and regression analysis using statistical tools to analyze the mediating effect.
Findings
Self-concept and employee performance elements have significant relationships. The mediating effect of resilience on the relationship between self-concept and counterproductive work behavior and self-concept and contextual performance is significant. In contrast, resilience does not impact the relationship between self-concept and task performance.
Originality/value
The authors examined a framework of untested variables, namely self-concept and the different factors of performance (task, contextual and counterproductive behavior). The authors investigated the mediating effect of resilience in the model, which was not previously explored.
Effective team behavior in high-performance environments such as in sport and the military requires individual team members to efficiently perceive the unfolding task events, predict the actions and action intents of the other team members, and plan and execute their own actions to simultaneously accomplish individual and collective goals. To enhance team performance through effective cooperation, it is crucial to measure the situation awareness and dynamics of each team member and how they collectively impact the team's functioning. Further, to be practically useful for real-life settings, such measures must be easily obtainable from existing sensors. This paper presents several methodologies that can be used on positional and movement acceleration data of team members to quantify and/or predict team performance, assess situation awareness, and to help identify task-relevant information to support individual decision-making. Given the limited reporting of these methods within military cohorts, these methodologies are described using examples from team sports and teams training in virtual environments, with discussion as to how they can be applied to real-world military teams.
For complex metro systems to operate efficiently, effective cooperation among teams is needed. Many accidents happen due to control failure caused by team errors during cooperation. Improving the efficiency of teamwork not only focuses on the team’s organizational structure and teamwork procedure, but also stresses each workers’ state during cooperation, because personal errors or interactions errors may lead to the collaboration failure. Combining the theory of human error and the complex network theory, this paper proposes a method to identify team errors and explore the mechanisms of team error during teamwork in the metro systems. Team cooperation is decomposed into each team member’s information process and interactions among human, machines and the environment, which are connected by a collection of information flows in the task. The TICN (Teamwork Information Complex Network) is established, in which information state of individual and interactions within agents are represented by nodes, and information flows are represented by directed edges. Then, vulnerable information states causing teamwork failure are identified by analyzing the degree centrality and betweenness centrality of the complex network. In the end, the model is applied to a specific emergency. The result shows that team members need enhanced skill-based level cognitive ability, the station supervisor needs a thorough understanding of the management system and rules, the decision-maker has to make and communicate decisions concisely, and the communication equipment should be adjusted and designed according to ergonomic requirements. Based on the results, some suggestions were put forward to improve the team performance in the metro system.
The crisis triggered by Covid-19 has exposed the interdependencies of modern society and sparked interest in local response to protracted and complex crisis situations. There has been a growing awareness and interest in the key roles of political and professional stakeholders, their emotional regulation and how they influence team performance and outcomes in dealing with uncertainty and complex crisis situations. While cognitive and behavioral aspects of crisis leadership are well researched, less is understood about how one can mitigate negative emotions, instill trust, or restore public faith and support of security forces and emergency response teams during crises. In addressing this gap, we propose a simplified conceptual roadmap for research and training of local crisis leadership. In this, we emphasize complex problem solving, team interaction, team context and technology and team training design. These four factors represent significant barriers if neglected. On the other side, they may be considerable force multipliers when better understood and managed. We suggest how seven research and training questions could be linked to the four conceptual factors and guide an evidence-based approach to develop local crisis leadership.
The rate of cyber-attacks on enterprise networks is increasing daily, accounting for losses in billions of dollars yearly. Professor Soren Morgan once asserted that if it were measured as a country, then the damages from cybercrime alone estimated at $6 trillion globally in 2021, would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China. This study examines the implications of cyber resilience on the security of enterprise network operations with a view to ascertaining how organizations in different economic sectors adopt cyber resilience strategies towards protecting their network resources against data and privacy violations. Twenty organizations in three different sectors were studied. The findings showed that organizations in the two sectors: oil and gas, and finance and banking, demonstrate better cyber security infrastructure and the adoption of cyber resilience strategies respectively, whereas, organizations in the higher education sector did not show remarkable
commitment to the adoption of good cyber security practices. Overall, all organizations appear rather slow in the implementation of multi-level resilience strategies.
A qualitative study by the School of Applied Psychology FHNW on the health consequences of waiving working time recording in banks yields interesting results: depending on the quality of the working conditions, waiving working time recording has either a positive or negative reinforcing effect.
Une étude qualitative de la Haute école spécialisée du Nord-Ouest de la Suisse à Olten sur les conséquences pour la santé du renoncement à l'enregistrement du temps de travail dans les banques donne des résultats intéressants : Selon la qualité des conditions de travail, cette renonciation a un effet renforçateur positif – ou négatif.
Risultati interessanti sono emersi da uno studio qualitativo condotto dalla Scuola universitaria professionale di psicologia applicata di Olten sulle conseguenze della rinuncia alla registrazione del tempo di lavoro nelle banche: in base alla qualità delle condizioni di lavoro tale rinuncia ha un’azione di amplificazione positiva o negativa.
Eine qualitative Studie der Hochschule für Angewandte Psychologie FHNW zu den gesundheitlichen Folgen des Verzichts auf Arbeitszeiterfassung in Banken ergibt interessante Resultate: Je nach Qualität der Arbeitsbedingungen hat dieser Verzicht eine positive - oder aber eine negative Verstärkerwirkung.
Small businesses in the Province of Batanes have experienced abrupt changes when COVID -19 outbreak happened in 2020. The business resiliency of different organizations has been tested in terms of their organization’s production and economic status. This study aims to determine how the Yawran Handicraft Weavers Association (YHWA) members assess their business resilience amidst COVID-19 specifically, in terms of production and financial resilience. It also aims to identify what strategies have been applied by the organization to continue its business amidst the threat of the pandemic. Focus group discussion was conducted among the seven (7) active members who are involved in the continuity of the production process of souvenirs. Repertory grid analysis used to allow participants to articulate their experiences and knowledge on certain constructs. Results showed that YHWA is resilient in terms of production because they still continue their business operations however, it has been discovered from other angles that they lack product management when it comes to the quantity of the product outputs and it compromises the quality of the products as well. In terms of financial resilience, YHWA found a way to circulate their income through money lending and buy & sell schemes. Researchers concluded that they were unaware of the concept of Resilience Plan but they are actually applying it unknowingly in their business operations. The researchers recommend the local government of Itbayat conduct training, and seminars for small businesses to widen their knowledge and strengthen their businesses during the pandemic. Researchers recommend other cooperative organizations, to strengthen their tourism initiatives during crises by conducting partnerships with other cooperative organizations in the province of Batanes. Researchers recommend importing products to the mainland regularly to help them cope with wider marketability.
Organizational resilience has attracted widespread attention in the management field as an indispensable element for successful organizational response to crises. However, a systematic insight into the overall development of organizational resilience has not been provided. In this study, CiteSpace was used as a bibliometric analysis tool to analyze the literature on organizational resilience at macro, meso, and micro levels, and summarize the hotspots and frontiers in different periods. Based on 622 journal articles from the Web of Science core database in the past 20 years (2003–2022), we used dual-map overlay analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, co-citation analysis, burst keyword detection, and statistical descriptive analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of the knowledge trajectory, disciplinary distribution, representative journals, research participants, key themes, hotspots, and frontiers of organizational resilience. The results of the study not only help researchers to clearly understand the development of organizational resilience research, but also to systematically identify the specific research areas and explore future directions.
This book of proceedings contains peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the 29th ISTE International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering (TE2022), organized by System Design and Management (SDM) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, United States from July 5–8, 2022.
TE2022 brought together a diverse global community of scholars and practitioners in dialogue and reflection on engineering itself. Engineering is changing rapidly. The
connectedness of the world’s most critical systems along with rapid advancement of
methods push us to ask “How will we teach, research, and practice engineering?”
Infrastructure systems such as water, electricity, gas, and so on are interdependent complex sociotechnical systems. As such, understanding the human or social component of these systems is critical for increasing resilience. Qualitative analyses, including cognitive task analyses conducted with utility systems personnel, suggested that the human or social part of these systems can be modeled as a multiteam system (MTS). The interdependent critical infrastructure systems (ICIs) that we examined were found to have all of the essential features of multiteam systems. Using the National Academy of Sciences resilience framework (plan, absorb, recover, adapt), we applied findings from the MTS literature to generate recommendations, cautions, and suggestions for future research in infrastructure systems design and practice.
The current study, based on the PERMA model, proposed and examined a hypothetical model exploring the effects of academic self-efficacy, positive relationships, and psychological resilience on university students’ life satisfaction. We collected data from a large sample of 1,089 university students in southwest China. The participants completed a battery of self-report questionnaire items measuring academic self-efficacy, positive relationships, psychological resilience, and life satisfaction. The results of the structural equation modeling analysis demonstrated a good fit for our data, suggesting that academic self-efficacy positively predicted university students’ life satisfaction through two independent mediators: positive relationships and psychological resilience. Findings yielded from the empirically validated hypothetical model add value to and enrich the PERMA model within a group of Chinese university students. The implications and practical suggestions for improving university students’ life satisfaction are discussed in light of these findings.
In the wake of the pandemic, many lessons have been learnt, and different challenges have been incurred, leading to the creation of not only stress but also limiting the activities of old-age people. One of the most vulnerable sections of the society is the ‘aging population'. This theoretical chapter discusses the concerns and complexities affecting the aging population in the present pandemic (COVID-19) and how the concerns and complexities impact social and economic activities. The chapter also explores the stress variable. The chapter uses the current scenario and secondary sources to explore the research phenomenon in-depth. Recommendations to the policymakers are given at the end.
Team resilience affects both the cohesion and subsequent performance of that team. For human teams, resilience is tied to team learning, team flexibility, social capital, and collective efficacy. But for human-autonomy teams, resilience also includes cyber resilience and robust and adaptable robotic control. This work builds out the theory associated with resilience in human-autonomy teams, followed by a step-by-step procedure for developing a resilience subscale for measuring human-autonomy team cohesion.
Considerable amount of research into the cognitive processes of code reading and understanding has been conducted. However, few studies have considered code comprehension with a specific focus on protected code. This research effort aims to contribute to filling this gap by describing strategies of software reverse engineering, the process of making sense of protected software code. Our study presented two Java programs, one available in clear code and one in obfuscated code. Participants worked on two tasks for each of the programs that required them to understand the program logic and how the code produces program behaviour. By means of a codebook, similarities and discrepancies between participants’ strategies are outlined in this paper.
Cyber resilience involves most societal actors, i.e. organizations, individuals, threat actors, governments, insurers, etc., at most levels of organization. Actors are embedded within each other and choose strategies based on beliefs and preferences which impact and is impacted by cyber resilience. The article reviews the literature, attempting to capture the core ingredients of cyber resilience. Non-threat actors seeking to obtain cyber resilience are distinguished from threat actors. Actors have resources, competence, technology, and tools. They make choices that impact the cyber resilience for all actors, including themselves. Cyber resilience relates to cyber insurance through entry requirements or preconditions for cyber contracts, need for various services such as incident response, data gathering, and cover limitations. Cyber resilience is linked to the internet of things which in the future can be expected to simplify life through artificial intelligence and machine learning, while being vulnerable through a large attack surface, insufficient technology, challenging handling of data, possible high trust in computers and software, and ethics.
Mental practice is the cognitive rehearsal of a task prior to performance. Although most researchers contend that mental practice is an effective means of enhancing performance, a clear consensus is precluded because (a) mental practice is often defined so loosely as to include almost any type of mental preparation and (b) empirical results are inconclusive. A meta-analysis of the literature on mental practice was conducted to determine the effect of mental practice on performance and to identify conditions under which mental practice is most effective. Results indicated that mental practice has a positive and significant effect on performance, and the effectiveness of mental practice was moderated by the type of task, the retention interval between practice and performance, and the length or duration of the mental practice intervention.
Regulatory agencies have long adopted a three‐tier framework for risk assessment. We build on this structure to propose a tiered approach for resilience assessment that can be integrated into the existing regulatory processes. Comprehensive approaches to assessing resilience at appropriate and operational scales, reconciling analytical complexity as needed with stakeholder needs and resources available, and ultimately creating actionable recommendations to enhance resilience are still lacking. Our proposed framework consists of tiers by which analysts can select resilience assessment and decision support tools to inform associated management actions relative to the scope and urgency of the risk and the capacity of resource managers to improve system resilience. The resilience management framework proposed is not intended to supplant either risk management or the many existing efforts of resilience quantification method development, but instead provide a guide to selecting tools that are appropriate for the given analytic need. The goal of this tiered approach is to intentionally parallel the tiered approach used in regulatory contexts so that resilience assessment might be more easily and quickly integrated into existing structures and with existing policies.
Leaders understand the importance of training their soldiers for rigorous combat assignments, but frequently misunderstand the importance of engaging in the resilience training activities discussed in this article.
This study assesses potentially traumatic combat and medical provider experiences and subsequent utilization of behavioral health (BH) services among United States Army medics (N =324) 3-months following a military deployment. After statistically controlling for socially desirable responding, neither combat nor medical provider experiences directly predicted utilization of BH services, however both predicted post-traumatic stress symptoms which in turn predicted BH utilization. Moderation analyses revealed that medics were less likely to utilize BH services after intense battle experiences if they reported a low hardy personality, or low unit support, or insufficient sleep. Possible interventions are discussed to promote BH care utilization among this unique population.
Objective:
The majority of individuals who endure traumatic events are resilient; however, we do not yet understand why some individuals are more resilient than others. We used data from a prospective longitudinal study Army National Guard and Reserve personnel to examine how unit cohesion (military-specific social support) and avoidant coping relate to resilience over the first year after return from deployment.
Method:
Soldiers (N = 767) were assessed at 4 phases: predeployment (P1), immediately postdeployment (P2), 3 months' postdeployment (P3), and 1-year postdeployment (P4).
Results:
After controlling for predeployment avoidant coping and overall social support, higher unit cohesion was associated with a reduction in avoidant coping (from P1 to P3). This reduction in avoidant coping (from P1 to P3) mediated the relationship between unit cohesion (P2) and improvement in mental health function (from P1 to P3).
Conclusions:
The results are consistent with the hypothesis that higher unit cohesion may mitigate increases in avoidant coping in military personnel after a combat deployment and in turn may improve mental health function. (PsycINFO Database Record
Military unit cohesion has been shown to correlate with physical and psychological outcomes. However, little is known about the development of cohesion in the early days of military service during Basic Combat Training (BCT) and how it relates to positive support and the negative stressors of training. The current study assessed the development of unit cohesion across the 10-week BCT period (N = 1,939), and the relation of cohesion to stress, resilience, mental health measures, and BCT outcomes (graduation, passing the Army Physical Fitness Test, and final Basic Rifle Marksmanship scores). The sample was primarily male (62%), under age 25 (88%), and unmarried (88%). All putative mediators showed significant change over time. Unit cohesion increased over time (slope 0.22; p < .001), and these increases were associated with decreases in psychological distress (p < .001), sleep problems (p < .001), and tolerance of BCT stressors (p < .001), as well as increases in resilience (p < .001), confidence managing stress reactions (p < .001), and positive states of mind (p < .001). Unit cohesion was indirectly associated with successful graduation and passing the Army Physical Fitness Test through cohesion-related improvement in psychological distress, resilience, and confidence managing reactions to stress. Sleep problems also mediated BCT graduation. Cohesion effects on the Basic Rifle Marksmanship scores were mediated by psychological distress and tolerance of BCT stressors only. These results suggest that unit cohesion may play a key role in the development of psychological health among new soldiers. (PsycINFO Database Record
Objective:
Few studies have examined the impact of military sexual trauma (MST) on social functioning during deployment. Yet consideration of unit relationships during deployment may be important, given that military unit cohesion and support can provide protective effects against the stress of combat, and reduce the likelihood of developing posttraumatic stress disorder.
Method:
Although prior research has posited that depleted social resources are one pathway through which MST is associated with posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), no studies have statistically tested this theory. This study examined the association of MST and PTSS and evaluated the potential mediating role of decreased unit relationship quality. Mediational analyses were conducted on a sample of veterans following discharge from military service (N = 818; 328 women, 490 men).
Results:
Women were significantly more likely to experience MST than men. As hypothesized, experiences of MST during deployment were associated with higher PTSS. MST experiences were associated with less trust in and support from one's military unit, which partially mediated the association between MST and PTSS. The indirect effect of MST on PTSS through lower unit relationship quality accounted for 20.4% of the total effect of MST on PTSS.
Conclusions:
While the retrospective study design precludes tests of causality, mediational findings provided statistical evidence that lower unit relationship quality partially explains the association between MST and PTSS. This finding is consistent with interpersonal theories of trauma response suggesting that the deleterious effects of MST may be in part due to its erosion of social resources during deployment. (PsycINFO Database Record
Background:
The benefit of military unit cohesion to morale and psychological resilience is well established. But it remains unclear whether unit cohesion modifies the association between deployment-related traumatic exposure and mental health problems.
Aims:
To examine the association between unit cohesion, traumatic exposure and poor mental health [symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological distress and alcohol dependency] and assess whether the relationship between traumatic exposure and poor mental health differs by level of unit cohesion.
Methods:
A self-reported cross-sectional survey of Australian military personnel deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan between 2001 and 2009.
Results:
Among 11411 participants, those with low levels of unit cohesion had higher odds of PTSD symptoms [aOR (95% CI): 2.54 (1.88, 3.42)], very high psychological distress [aOR (95% CI): 4.28 (3.04, 6.02)] and a high level of alcohol problems [aOR (95% CI): 1.71 (1.32, 2.22)] compared with those reporting high unit cohesion on deployment. Higher exposure to traumatic events on deployment was associated with greater risk of PTSD symptoms, very high levels of psychological distress and high levels of alcohol problems in this cohort. However, there was no evidence of a statistically significant interaction between unit cohesion and traumatic exposures in influencing poor mental health.
Conclusions:
Our findings suggest that both unit cohesion and traumatic exposure are independently associated with poor mental health. Efforts to improve military unit cohesion may help to improve the mental health resilience of military personnel, regardless of their level of traumatic exposure.
Can social resilience be trained? We report results of a double-dissociative randomized controlled study in which 48 Army platoons were randomly assigned to social resilience training (intervention condition) or cultural awareness training (active control group). The same surveys were administered to all platoons at baseline and after the completion of training to determine the short-term training effects, generalization effects beyond training, and possible adverse effects. Multilevel modeling analyses indicated that social resilience, compared with cultural awareness, training produced small but significant improvements in social cognition (e.g., increased empathy, perspective taking, & military hardiness) and decreased loneliness, but no evidence was found for social resilience training to generalize beyond these training foci nor to have adverse effects. Moreover, as predicted, cultural awareness, compared with social resilience, training produced increases in knowledge about and decreases in prejudice toward Afghans. Additional research is warranted to determine the long-term durability, safety, and generalizability of social resilience training. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
A large number of studies have shown that hardiness and cohesion are associated with mental health in a military context. However, most of them are presented without controlling for baseline mental health symptoms, which is their most significant source of error. The present study investigates the combined effect of hardiness and cohesion in a prospective design, controlling for baseline levels of symptoms among Norwegian personnel serving in a peacekeeping operation in Kosovo. Multivariate regression analyses were performed in which self-reported mental health complaints were regressed on our explanatory variables. Our findings suggest that both cohesion and hardiness contributed to increased stress resiliency, as measured by a lower level of reported mental health complaints. Our baseline measure of mental health accounted for a larger proportion of the variance than our other predictors. A significant interaction between cohesion and hardiness suggested a combined effect, over and above the individual contributions of the predictors. For individuals who scored high on hardiness, cohesion levels did not influence levels of mental health complaints. Individuals who scored low on hardiness, on the other hand, reported lower levels of mental health complaints when cohesion levels were high.
© 2015 The Authors. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology published by Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
The purpose of this evaluation is to examine the effectiveness of Master Resilience Training, which is a pillar of the Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness (CSF2) program. The report evaluates the relationship between resilience training and diagnoses for mental health or substance abuse problems and whether this relationship was mediated by Soldiers’ self-reported resilience/ psychological health (R/PH). In other words, we tested whether Soldiers with MRT trainers in their units experienced increases in self-reported R/PH, and whether increases in self-reported R/PH were associated with reduced odds of Soldiers receiving diagnoses for mental health or substance abuse problems.
The results revealed that exposure to resilience training increased various aspects of Soldier R/PH, which, in turn, appeared to be associated with a reduced likelihood of receiving a diagnosis for a mental health problem (i.e., anxiety, depression, or posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]). Thus, this finding suggested that the reduced odds of receiving a diagnosis for a mental health problem was partly due to increases in indicators of R/PH that were likely associated with exposure to resilience training. Moreover, the findings provided evidence that Soldiers exposed to the training were diagnosed with substance abuse problems at a significantly lower rate than Soldiers who were not exposed to the training.
Importantly, the results of this evaluation bolster findings from previous evaluations by employing more sophisticated and stringent statistical techniques to demonstrate that resilience training can improve the R/PH of Soldiers. Additionally, the analyses included in this evaluation accounted for the potential effects of Soldier deployment; these considerations were not made in previous evaluations of the program. Therefore, the current evaluation provides further evidence that resilience training may improve the self-reported R/PH of Soldiers, even when controlling for a wider range of factors that might be expected to impact the R/PH of Soldiers.
The findings of this evaluation have a number of implications. First, this evaluation provides some evidence that resilience training may be related to improvements on objective measures of mental and behavioral outcomes (i.e., diagnoses for mental health and substance abuse problems). Second, when considered at the organizational level, the effects of resilience training may reach beyond improving the health of individual Soldiers by improving the aggregate health and effectiveness of the Army as an organization. Given that diagnoses for mental health disorders are a leading cause for hospitalization in the Armed Forces (Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, 2012b), the findings provide evidence that interventions such as those offered by CSF2 may help relieve the stress that is currently being placed on medical services in the Army. In sum, it appears that the improvement of R/PH through resilience training efforts can protect against problems that undermine the effectiveness and efficiency of the Army.
As with any large-scale evaluation of this type, there are a number of limitations to be acknowledged. First, the timing of deployment cycles of Soldiers in the eight Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) that were examined introduced potential confounds with regard to the timing of resilience training and data collection efforts for use in this report. Specifically, it appeared that the timing of deployments was such that Soldiers with MRTs in their units were more likely to have been deployed to combat than were those who had no MRT trainers in their units. This means that Soldiers who received resilience training were also more likely to have experienced combat which likely increased the probability of subsequently experiencing the adverse outcomes examined in this study. While this fact posed a potential confound, statistical controls were put in place that allowed for a meaningful test of the resilience training program’s effect on R/PH and diagnoses for mental health and substance abuse problems. Other limitations of this evaluation effort have been described elsewhere (Lester, Harms, Herian, Krasikova & Beal, 2011c) and are expanded upon later in this report.
In light of these limitations, it is important that readers recognize two points when reviewing this report. First, this report builds on previous evaluations of the CSF2 program. Specifically, the analyses used here were more stringent given the nature of the data. It is important to note that, given the more rigorous testing methods, the results of this and previous evaluations are fairly consistent. Second, it is critical to recognize that the findings presented in this report represent the latest effort in an ongoing evaluation of the resilience training program. Future analyses may also be conducted that empirically explore the relationship between resilience training and other objective outcomes. If such analyses are undertaken, it is possible that the results may differ from those presented here and in previous evaluations due to the amount of time that has passed since implementation of the training program. In the end, however, the effectiveness of CSF2 cannot be judged solely on the results of any single evaluation, but instead must be considered in light of the entire body of work done to date.
This study investigated the relationship between collective positive emotions at work and team resilience, expanding on the Broaden and Build theory of Fredrickson (1998; 2001) at the collective (i.e., work teams) level of analysis. Through the aggregate scores of 1,076 employees (61 % men), grouped into 216 teams and belonging to 40 companies, five collective positive emotions were evaluated (i.e., enthusiasm, optimism, satisfaction, comfort, and relaxation) as well as team resilience. Additionally, ratings of the 216 supervisors of the teams were used to assess team performance (i.e., in- and extra-role performance). Structural equation modeling at the team level of analysis indicated that team resilience mediates the relationship between collective positive emotions and team performance, both in- and extra-role. The results highlight the importance of developing collective positive emotions to help teams to foster team resilience and improve their performance. The article concludes with practical strategies aimed at developing collective positive emotions, together with limitations and suggestions for future research.
Background:
The critical nursing shortage is particularly apparent in specialty areas such as intensive care units (ICUs). Some nurses develop resilient coping strategies and adapt to stressful work experiences, mitigating the development of common maladaptive psychological symptoms.
Objectives:
To determine if a multimodal resilience training program for ICU nurses was feasible to perform and acceptable to the study participants.
Methods:
In a randomized and controlled 12-week intervention study, treatment and control groups completed demographic questions and measures of resilience, anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and burnout syndrome before and after the intervention. The intervention included a 2-day educational workshop, written exposure sessions, event-triggered counseling sessions, mindfulness-based stress reduction exercises, and a protocolized aerobic exercise regimen. Nurses in the intervention arm also completed satisfaction surveys for each component of the intervention.
Results:
This mulitmodal resilience training program was feasible to conduct and acceptable to ICU nurses. Both nurses randomized to the treatment group and nurses randomized to the control group showed a significant decrease in PTSD symptom score after the intervention.
Conclusions:
A multifaceted resilience training program for ICU nurses was both feasible and acceptable. A sufficiently powered, randomized clinical trial is needed to assess the effect of the intervention on improving individuals' level of resilience and improving psychological outcomes such as symptoms of anxiety, depression, burnout syndrome, and PTSD.
Escalating damages associated with international catastrophes, such as Hurricane Sandy and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Meltdown, have spurred the Office of the President to release Executive Orders that direct government agencies to enhance national preparedness and resilience. However, there has been a struggle to comply with these directives as there is limited guidance on how to measure and design resilient systems. As a further challenge, the Defense Science Board states that resilience metrics must be focused, yet generalized, in order to be applied across cyber, defense, and energy systems in the Department of Defense and other agencies. We assert that metrics of resilience in the literature often fail due to existing conceptual issues that reduce their use, including the conflation of risk and resilience, and the necessity of reconciling engineering and ecological resilience definitions and objectives. We explain these conceptual issues and discuss military doctrine required to support the development of metrics that meet government agency needs. Furthermore, we provide a list of example metrics that overcome these barriers, and can be used across systems. Key Concepts • Resilience metrics must be general enough to support broad applications, yet precise enough to measure system-specific qualities. Such metrics are necessary to make resource and operations decisions in government agencies that manage diverse systems (e.g., cyber, defense, ecological, and energy), while fostering cooperation between agencies. • Risk assessment is the traditional method used to make decisions about adverse events. Resilience and risk are often conflated, but risk-based quantitative and qualitative methods provide limited guidance for emerging and unforeseen threats.
As federal agencies and businesses rely more on cyber infrastructure, they are increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks that can cause damages disproportionate to the sophistication and cost to launch the attack. In response, regulatory authorities call for focusing attention on enhancing infrastructure resilience. For example, in the USA, President Obama issued an Executive Order and policy directives focusing on improving the resilience and security of cyber infrastructure to a wide range of cyber threats. Despite the national and international importance, resilience metrics to inform management decisions are still in the early stages of development. We apply the resilience matrix framework developed by Linkov et al. (Environ Sci Technol 47:10108–10110, 2013) to develop and organize effective resilience metrics for cyber systems. These metrics link national policy goals to specific system measures, such that resource allocation decisions can be translated into actionable interventions and investments. In this paper, a number of metrics have been identified and assessed using quantitative and qualitative measures found in the literature. We have proposed a generic approach and could integrate actual data, technical judgment, and literature-based measures to assess system resilience across physical, information, cognitive, and social domains.
Purpose
– It is increasingly important for organizations to respond effectively and promote positive outcomes under adverse and unstable conditions. Resilience is salient because reflects the dynamic process that enables successful results under stressful conditions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential role of team resilience as the psychological mechanism that explains how job demands and job social resources are related to and enhance team performance.
Design/methodology/approach
– Self-reported questionnaires were distributed to 1,633 employees, nested in 275 teams from 52 Spanish small and medium enterprises. Aggregated scores were employed for a team-level structural equation modeling analysis.
Findings
– Results support a partial mediation model in which job social resources affect team resilience, and in turn impact team performance. No significant effects were found for job demands affecting team resilience. However, the demands×resources interaction influences team resilience, and thus the impact of resources on team resilience was attenuated by demands. In the same way, the demands×resources interaction influences team performance.
Research limitations/implications
– Job social resources are related to team performance, but team resilience is a significant mediator. Further research should investigate the effects of different job demands on team resilience.
Practical implications
– The results suggest that managers should focus on developing job social resources to augment team resilience and team performance.
Originality/value
– Managers could benefit from understanding how team resilience could be developed, given that team resilience aids to achieve positive team outcomes.
Abstract Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the most widespread mental illness resulting from exposure to combat, necessitating an increase in the provision of group therapy. This pilot study examined the efficacy of, and treatment outcome predictors associated with, group inpatient treatment of combat-related PTSD. Participants included 38 active duty military personnel deployed during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), diagnosed with PTSD, and consecutive admissions to an inpatient PTSD treatment facility. A paired samples t-test revealed significant change in symptom severity and global functioning between pre- and post-treatment. Multiple regression analyses supported the predictive utility of baseline symptomatology and group cohesion (> 50% of the variance in treatment outcome), highlighting the importance of group cohesion in the efficacy of group treatment for combat-related PTSD.
Team-based structures have become more widely used in organizations. Therefore, it is important for team members to perform well in their current team and to build skills and enthusiasm for working on future teams. This study examined team debriefing, an intervention in which team members reflect on recent experiences to prepare for subsequent tasks. Prior researchers have shown that facilitated team debriefs work, but they have not examined how to enable teams to conduct their own debriefs or studied how debriefs affect individual level outcomes. Therefore, we compared 2 team-led debriefing techniques: (a) an unguided debrief and (b) a guided debrief designed to incorporate lessons learned from prior debriefs. We collected data from 174 business students who were members of 35 teams from 9 sections of a Strategic Management course. Class sections were randomly assigned to one of the debriefing conditions, and teams completed 4 business cases over 10 weeks. A multilevel design was employed and a multistage model building approach was used to test the hypotheses using hierarchical linear modeling techniques. Results of this cluster randomized, quasi-experimental design suggest that the team-led guided debrief intervention resulted in superior team processes as compared to the unguided debriefing method. Team processes, in turn, related significantly to greater team performance and increased individual readiness for teamwork and enthusiasm for teaming. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
Objectives: The objectives of this study were to develop a definition of team resilience and to identify the resilient characteristics of elite sport teams.
Design and method: Focus groups consisting of a total of 31 participants were conducted with five elite teams from a range of sports. An interpretive thematic analysis using inductive and deductive reasoning was employed to analyze the data.
Results and conclusions: Team resilience was defined as a dynamic, psychosocial process which protects a group of individuals from the potential negative effect of the stressors they collectively encounter. It comprises of processes whereby team members use their individual and combined resources to positively adapt when experiencing adversity. Findings revealed four main resilient characteristics of elite sport teams: group structure, mastery approaches, social capital, and collective efficacy. This study extends resilience research in sport psychology by providing greater conceptual clarity of resilience at a team level. The implications of the findings for those conducting research in this area and for those consulting with elite sport teams are discussed.
The concept of morale, within its military context, was explored in the present work from both its theoretical and practical aspects. Following a review of the concept's definitional and historical background, the data from a pre-war morale survey administered in May of 1981 to a large sample of Israeli combat troops were analyzed (by means of intercorrelations and factor analysis) as an illustration of the multifaceted structure of morale. While the intercorrelations revealed several major variables related strongly to morale, the factor analysis yielded eight factors, morale being just one of them. These eight factors were: (1) confidence in senior commanders; (2) confidence in one's self, team, and weapons; (3) unit cohesion and morale; (4) familiarity with missions and frontage; (5) confidence in immediate commanders; (6) enemy evaluation; (7) legitimacy of war; (8) worries and concerns. The present analysis may suggest the existence of a higher order concept—perhaps “unit climate”— of which all of the found factors, including morale, are the comprising components.
Abstract Although single-session individual debriefing is contraindicated, the efficacy of group psychological debriefing remains unresolved. We conducted the first randomized controlled trial of critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) with emergency workers (67 volunteer fire-fighters) following shared exposure to an occupational potentially traumatic event (PTE). The goals of group CISD are to prevent post-traumatic stress and promote return to normal functioning following a PTE. To assess both goals we measured four outcomes, before and after the intervention: post-traumatic stress, psychological distress, quality of life, and alcohol use. Fire brigades were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: (1) CISD, (2) Screening (i.e., no-treatment), or (3) stress management Education. Controlling for pre-intervention scores, CISD was associated with significantly less alcohol use post-intervention relative to Screening, and significantly greater post-intervention quality of life relative to Education. There were no significant effects on post-traumatic stress or psychological distress. Overall, CISD may benefit broader functioning following exposure to work-related PTEs. Future research should focus on individual, group, and organizational factors and processes that can promote recovery from operational stressors. Ultimately, an occupational health (rather than victim-based) approach will provide the best framework for understanding and combating potential threats to the health and well-being of workers at high risk for PTE exposure.
SUMMARY This paper presents a conceptual framework to define seismic resilience of communities and quantitative measures of resilience that can be useful for a coordinated research effort focusing on enhancing this resilience. This framework relies on the complementary measures of resilience: "Reduced failure probabilities," "Reduced consequences from failures," and "Reduced time to recovery." The framework also includes quantitative measures of the "ends" of robustness and rapidity, and the "means" of resourcefulness and redundancy, and integrates those measures into the four dimensions of community resilience — technical, organizational, social and economic.
Many professions vital to the safety of society require workers to face high magnitude and potentially traumatizing events. Because this routine exposure can cause high levels of stress in workers, it is important to investigate factors that contribute to both risk of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and healthy responses to stress. Although some research has found social support to mitigate the effects of posttraumatic stress symptoms, scant research has investigated organizational support. The aim of the present study is to investigate the temporal relationship between stress symptoms and perceived organizational support in a sample of 1,039 service members deployed to the peacekeeping mission to Kosovo. Participants completed self-report measures of stress symptoms and perceived organizational support at 4 study time points. Bivariate latent difference score structural equation modeling was utilized to examine the temporal relationship among stress and perceived organizational support. In general, across the 4 time points, latent PCL scores evidenced a salient and negative relationship to subsequent POS latent difference scores. However, no significant relationship was found between latent POS variables and subsequent PCL latent difference scores. Findings suggest that prior stress symptoms are influencing service member's perceptions of the supportiveness of their organization such that increased prior stress is associated with worsening perceptions of support. These results illustrate that targeting stress directly may potentiate the positive influence of organizational support and that institutional support programs should be adapted to better account for the negative biases increased distress may encourage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
This article statistically and empirically examines the chi-square test of homogeneity of effect sizes when that test is applied to correlation coefficients and to their Fisher's
r-to-
z transformation equivalents. Shows that the test on untransformed
rs has excessively high Type I error rates as a result of distribution characteristics of
r but that the test performs nominally for Fisher's
r-to-
z transformation values. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A longstanding research question in the sport psychology literature has been whether a given amount of mental practice prior to performing a motor skill will enhance one's subsequent performance. The research literature, however, has not provided any clear-cut answers to this question and this has prompted the present, more comprehensive review of existing research using the meta-analytic strategy proposed by Glass (1977). From the 60 studies yielding 146 effect sizes the overall average effect size was .48, which suggests, as did Richardson (1967a), that mentally practicing a motor skill influences performance somewhat better than no practice at all. Effect sizes were also compared on a number of variables thought to moderate the effects of mental practice. Results from these comparisons indicated that studies employing cognitive tasks had larger average effect sizes than motor or strength tasks and that published studies had larger average effect sizes than unpublished studies. These findings are discus...
Mental practice is the cognitive rehearsal of a task prior to performance. Although most researchers contend that mental practice is an effective means of enhancing performance, a clear consensus is precluded because (a) mental practice is often defined so loosely as to include almost any type of mental preparation and (b) empirical results are inconclusive. A meta-analysis of the literature on mental practice was conducted to determine the effect of mental practice on performance and to identify conditions under which mental practice is most effective. Results indicated that mental practice has a positive and significant effect on performance, and the effectiveness of mental practice was moderated by the type of task, the retention interval between practice and performance, and the length or duration of the mental practice intervention.
This book offers a comprehensive view on resilience based upon state-of-the-science theories and methodological applications that resilience may fill. Specifically, this text provides a compendium of knowledge on the theory, methods, and practice of resilience across a variety of country and case contexts, and demonstrates how a resilience-based approach can help further improved infrastructure, vibrant societies, and sustainable environments and ecologies, among many others.
Resilience is a term with thousands of years of history. Only recently has resilience been applied to the management of complex interconnected systems, yet its impact as a governing philosophy and an engineering practice has been pronounced. Colloquially, resilience has been used as a synonym for ‘bouncing back’. Philosophically and methodologically, however, it is much more. In a world defined by interconnected and interdependent systems such as water, food, energy, transportation, and the internet, a sudden and unexpected disruption to one critical system can lead to significant challenges for many others. The Science and Practice of Resilience is beneficial for those seeking to gain a rich knowledge of the resilience world, as well as for practitioners looking for methods and tools by which resilience may be applied in real-world contexts.
This volume addresses the challenges associated with methodology and application of risk and resilience science and practice to address emerging threats in environmental, cyber, infrastructure and other domains. The book utilizes the collective expertise of scholars and experts in industry, government and academia in the new and emerging field of resilience in order to provide a more comprehensive and universal understanding of how resilience methodology can be applied in various disciplines and applications. This book advocates for a systems-driven view of resilience in applications ranging from cyber security to ecology to social action, and addresses resilience-based management in infrastructure, cyber, social domains and methodology and tools. Risk and Resilience has been written to open up a transparent dialog on resilience management for scientists and practitioners in all relevant academic disciplines and can be used as supplement in teaching risk assessment and management courses.
Resilience analysis and thinking serve as emerging conceptual frameworks relevant for applications assessing risk. Connections between the domains of resilience and risk assessment include vulnerability. Infrastructure, social, economic, and ecological systems (and combined social-ecological systems) are vulnerable to exogenous global change, and other disturbances, both natural and anthropologically derived. Resilience analysis fundamentally seeks to provide the groundwork for a ‘soft landing’, or an efficient and robust restoration following disturbance as well as the ability to reduce harms while helping the targeted system rebound to full functionality as quickly and efficiently where possible. Such applications are consistent with The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) definition of resilience, which more broadly denotes the field as “the ability to plan and prepare for, absorb, recover from, and adapt to adverse events” (Larkin S, Fox-Lent C, Eisenberg DA, Trump BD, Wallace S, Chadderton C, Linkov I (2015) Benchmarking agency and organizational practices in resilience decision making. Environ Sys Decisions 35(2):185–195). Given this definition, we seek to describe how resilience analysis and resilience thinking might be applied to social considerations for critical infrastructure systems. Specifically, we indicate how resilience might better coordinate societal elements of such infrastructure to identify, mitigate, and efficiently recover from systemic shocks and stresses that threaten system performance and service capacity.
As U.S. service members deploy for extended periods on a repeated basis, their ability to cope with the stress of deployment may be challenged. A growing number of programs and strategies provided by the military and civilian sectors are available to encourage and support psychological resilience to stress for service members and families. Though previous research from the field of psychology delineating the factors that foster psychological resilience is available, there has been no assessment of whether and how well the current military resilience programs are addressing these factors in their activities. Further, little is known about the effectiveness of these programs on developing resilience. To assist the Department of Defense in understanding methodologies that could be useful in promoting resilience among service members and their families, the research team conducted a focused literature review to identify evidence-informed factors for promoting psychological resilience. The team also reviewed a subset of military resilience programs to determine the extent to which they included those evidence-informed factors. This article describes the context, approach, and findings from these research activities.
Background:
The personal resources of social support, unit cohesion, and trait resilience have been found to be associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) severity among military personnel. However, the underlying mechanisms of these relationships are unclear. We hypothesized that negative posttraumatic cognitions, which are associated with PTSD, mediate the relationships between these personal resources and PTSD.
Methods:
The relationship between PTSD symptom severity and a latent factor comprised of social support, unit cohesion, and trait resilience was evaluated using cross-sectional data from 366 treatment-seeking active duty military personnel with PTSD following deployments to or near Iraq or Afghanistan. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test whether posttraumatic cognitions mediated this relationship.
Results:
The SEM model indicated that (1) a robust latent variable named personal resources (indicated by social support, unit cohesion, and trait resilience) was negatively associated with PTSD severity; (2) personal resources were negatively associated with negative posttraumatic cognitions; (3) negative posttraumatic cognitions fully mediated the association between personal resources and PTSD severity. The final SEM mediation model showed a highly satisfactory fit [χ(2) (22) = 16.344, p = 0.798; χ(2)/df = 0.743; CFI = 1; RMSEA = 0.000].
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that among active duty military personnel seeking treatment for PTSD, personal resources (social support, unit cohesion, and trait resilience) may mitigate PTSD severity by reducing negative posttraumatic cognitions.
Background:
The Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (RNoNA) has an interest in enhancing military teams' knowledge, skills and abilities to deal with complex situations and environments.
Objective:
The objective is to document the need for resilience in military teams and to expand the understanding of how such behavior can be meaningfully instilled through team training interventions.
Method:
Norwegian military subject matter experts (SMEs) assessed the performance of military teams participating in complex military training exercises. Eight cadet teams at the RNoNA were assessed during two separate 4-hour simulator training exercises and a 48-hour live training exercise.
Results:
Positive Spearman rank correlation coefficients between resilience assessments in the simulator training exercises and the live training exercise were strongest when the simulator scenario emphasized resilience factors inherent in the live exercise, and weakest when the simulator scenario did not facilitate the task demands in the live exercise.
Conclusion:
The study showed that resilience assessed in teams during simulator training exercises predicted their resilient behavior in a subsequent live training exercise and that the proper design of scenario-based simulator training can realistically and effectively represent resilience stressors found in live operations.
Purpose:
Prior studies suggest that cohesion among members of military units has a positive impact on behavioral and mental health sequelae of combat deployment. However, these studies have not distinguished variation in cohesion across units from variation in perception of cohesion across individuals within units.
Methods:
A sample of U.S. Marines was assessed before and after deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan in 2010 or 2011. Within-group centering was used to distinguish unit-level from individual-level associations of cohesion with four behavioral and mental health outcomes assessed after deployment: alcohol misuse, violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), probable posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a positive screen for depression.
Results:
Unit-level cohesion is associated positively with alcohol misuse (OR=1.86, 95% CI 1.05-3.29) and negatively with UCMJ violations (OR=0.41, 95% CI 0.20-0.83) but not with probable PTSD (OR=1.00, 95% CI 0.60-1.6) or a positive screen for depression (OR=1.00 95% CI 0.58-1.72). Lower perception of cohesion relative to the other members of the same unit is associated with higher likelihood of UCMJ violations, probable PTSD and a positive screen for depression.
Limitations:
Data on all members of the studied units were not available.
Conclusions:
Distinguishing unit-level from individual-level variation in cohesion among military unit members reveals more varied associations with behavioral and mental health outcomes of deployment than have been reported in previous studies, in which these levels have been collapsed. Associations between individual-level variation in cohesion and mental health outcomes may result from pre-existing traits related to both perception of cohesion and risk for psychiatric disorders.
This research investigated a group counselling model for Thai army rangers in the three southernmost provinces during political conflict. The intervention focused on the improvement of mental health and resilience, and the reduction of risk symptoms related to stress. The group process was the interactive model of existential therapy, art therapy using mandala, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychoeducation. The design was a controlled experiment. Forty-four voluntary rangers aged between 22 and 45 years were randomly assigned equally to the experiment and the control groups. They were selected from 384 rangers derived by cluster sampling based on low scores of Resilience Scale and Thai Mental Health Indicator (TMHI-54), and on high scores of Thai General Health Questionnaires (GHQ-28). The assessment was done before treatment, at termination and at 1-month follow-up. The experimental group attended a 20-session group counselling, whereas the control group received educational information. Data analyses indicated that the average scores of those attending group counselling after the experiment and follow-up were significantly different from those of the control in all three inventories with relative medium effect sizes and at 1-month follow-up with small decrease in effect sizes. The significant differences were also revealed in subscales.
Psychological capital is a positive psychological state that influences employees’ behaviors and attitudes. Research has only recently begun to examine the phenomenon as a shared psychological team state. The purpose of this research is to examine the mediating role of team psychological capital in the relationship between learning climate and outcomes at the individual and team levels. The findings, which were carried out among 82 school management teams, indicated a positive relationship between learning climate and the team’s psychological capital, and between the team’s psychological capital and the individual’s job satisfaction and the team’s organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). It was also found that team’s psychological capital mediates the relationship between the team’s learning climate and job satisfaction, and between learning mechanisms and the team’s OCB. The findings might encourage research into psychological capital as a team phenomenon and encourage decision-makers to develop ways of reinforcing psychological capital among teams.
Recent directives from the US Office of the President have detailed the need for resilience in the face of increased security threats and natural disasters. While these documents call for resilience improvements, no guiding framework for the assessment of resilience exists. Federal agencies are then deriving individual ways to address resilience, resulting in a series of parallel efforts instead of one national cohesive effort. This paper summarizes the portfolio of current efforts implemented by agencies to guide the integration of resilience assessment across the federal government. We present a critical overview on the state of resilience science within seven federal agencies and our perspective on the consistencies and disparities on how each agency is enacting presidential orders. The resulting analysis identifies differences in approaches to resilience and common ground upon which federal agencies can use to support more effective programs.
Over a decade of research attests to the importance of resilience in the workplace for employee well‐being and performance. Yet, surprisingly, there has been no attempt to synthesize the evidence for the efficacy of resilience training in this context. The purpose of this study, therefore is to provide a systematic review of work‐based resilience training interventions. Our review identified 14 studies that investigated the impact of resilience training on personal resilience and four broad categories of dependent variables: (1) mental health and subjective well‐being outcomes, (2) psychosocial outcomes, (3) physical/biological outcomes, and (4) performance outcomes. Findings indicated that resilience training can improve personal resilience and is a useful means of developing mental health and subjective well‐being in employees. We also found that resilience training has a number of wider benefits that include enhanced psychosocial functioning and improved performance. Due to the lack of coherence in design and implementation, we cannot draw any firm conclusions about the most effective content and format of resilience training. Therefore, going forward, it is vital that future research uses comparative designs to assess the utility of different training regimes, explores whether some people might benefit more/less from resilience training, and demonstrates consistency in terms of how resilience is defined, conceptualized, developed, and assessed.
Practitioner points
Despite conceptual and theoretical support for resilience training, the empirical evidence is tentative, with the exception of a large effect for mental health and subjective well‐being outcomes.
Most programmes utilize a cognitive‐behavioural approach to developing resilience.
At this stage, there is no definitive evidence for the most effective training content or format, but it would appear wise to include an element of one‐to‐one training and support based on individual needs.
Organizations have increasingly sought to adopt resilience‐building programmes to prevent absenteeism, counterproductive work behaviour, and other stress‐related issues. However, the effectiveness of these programmes remains unclear as a comprehensive review of existing primary evidence has not been undertaken. Using 42 independent samples across 37 studies, the present meta‐analysis sought to address this limitation in the literature by summarizing the effectiveness of resilience‐building programmes implemented in organizational contexts. Results demonstrated that the overall effect of such programmes was small ( d = 0.21) and that programme effects diminish over time ( d proximal = 0.26 vs. d distal = 0.07). Alternatively, moderator analyses revealed that programmes targeting individuals thought to be at greater risk of experiencing stress and lacking core protective factors showed the opposite effect over time. Programmes employing a one‐on‐one delivery format (e.g., coaching) were most effective, followed by the classroom‐based group delivery format. Programmes using train‐the‐trainer and computer‐based delivery formats were least effective. Finally, substantially stronger effects were observed among studies employing single‐group within‐participant designs, in comparison with studies utilizing between‐participant designs. Taken together, these findings provide important theoretical and practical implications for advancing the study and use of resilience‐building in the workplace.
Practitioner points
Resilience‐building programmes have had a modest effect in the workplace. The effect is weaker than that associated with secondary prevention techniques, but similar to those shown for other primary prevention techniques.
Across primary studies, programme effects diminished substantially from proximal (≤1 month post‐intervention) to distal time points (>1 month). However, among those at greater risk of experiencing stress or who lack protective resources, weak proximal effects became stronger when measured distally. To optimize the effectiveness of resilience‐building programmes, developers should carefully conduct needs assessments, identifying individuals at elevated risk.
Methodological decisions (i.e., the use of within‐ vs. between‐participant designs) may have a substantial impact on the conclusions researchers draw regarding the effectiveness of resilience‐building programmes. When evaluating the effectiveness of resilience‐building programmes, researchers and practitioners should compare observed effects to estimates of mean effects across studies using similar evaluative designs.
Background: Resilience Training has the potential to mitigate mental health symptoms when provided during initial military training. Methods: The present study examined the impact of Resilience Training on US soldier well-being and attitudes during Basic Combat Training. Platoons were randomly assigned to Resilience Training or Military History provided during the first few days of Basic Combat Training. Surveys were conducted at baseline, post-intervention, and 3, 6, and 9 weeks. Results: The sample resulted in a total of 1,939 soldiers who completed at least the baseline and one follow-up survey. There were no significant differences between conditions in terms of depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, or sleep problems. However, while anxiety decreased in both conditions, the rate of decrease was faster in the Resilience Training condition. In contrast, Resilience Training had a slower rate of increase in group cohesion over time than the Military History condition. In addition, Resilience Training was associated with greater confidence in helping others and received more positive ratings than Military History. Conclusions: Findings demonstrate that the brief Resilience Training studied here may have some utility in supporting mental health and peer support but may not benefit unit climate.
© 2014 The International Association of Applied Psychology.
Posttraumatic growth (PTG) refers to the positive cognitive, spiritual, emotional, and social changes that can occur after a traumatic experience. The current study uses data from 1,663 soldiers who participated in a voluntary survey 6 months after redeployment. The purpose of this study was to predict posttraumatic growth from combat exposure, unit cohesion, and demographic characteristics. We found that greater combat exposure and stronger unit cohesion were associated with more PTG. Being married, a minority, and a junior enlisted soldier were also predictive of greater PTG. Our study defines a group of soldiers with low PTG who are at risk for adverse psychosocial problems. Our results suggest that unit cohesion could be targeted and strengthened to improve PTG.
To evaluate the efficacy of an entire hospital simulation in imparting skills to expert healthcare providers, encompassing both retention and transfer to clinical practice.
Studies demonstrating the effectiveness of simulation do not concentrate upon expert multidisciplinary teams. Moreover, their focus is confined to a single clinical setting, thereby not considering the complex interactions across multiple hospital departments.
A total of 288 participants (Attending surgeons, anesthesiologists, physicians, and nurses) completed this largest simulation study to date, set in the UK Defence Medical Services' Hospital Simulator and the conflict zone in Afghanistan. The simulator termed "Hospital Exercise" (HOSPEX) is a fully immersive live-in simulation experience that covers the entire environment of a military hospital with all departments. Participants undertook a 3-day training program within HOSPEX before deployment to war zones. Primary outcome measures were assessed with IMPAcT (the Imperial Military Personnel Assessment Tool). IMPAcT measures crisis management, trauma care, hospital environment, operational readiness, and transfer of skills to civilian practice. Reliability, skills learning, and retention in the conflict zone were assessed statistically.
Reliability in skills assessment was excellent (Cronbach α: nontechnical skills = 0.87-0.94; environment/patient skills = 0.83-0.95). Pre/post-HOSPEX comparisons revealed significant improvements in decision making (M = 4.98, SD = 1.20 to M = 5.39, SD = 0.91; P = 0.03), situational awareness (M = 5.44, SD = 1.04 to M = 5.74, SD = 0.92; P = 0.01), trauma care (M = 5.53, SD = 1.23 to M = 5.85, SD = 1.09; P = 0.05), and knowledge of hospital environment (M = 5.19, SD = 1.17 to M = 5.42, SD = 0.97; P = 0.04). No skills decayed over time when assessed several months later in the real conflict zone. All skills transferred to civilian clinical practice.
This is the first study to describe the value of a full-hospital simulation across the entire patient pathway. Such macrosimulations may be the way forward for integrating the complex training needs of expert clinicians and testing organizational "fitness for purpose" of entire hospitals.
Using hierarchical linear modeling, the relation of cohesion to well-being, identification, disintegration, and perceived individual and group combat readiness was examined simultaneously at the individual, soldier level and at the group, company level. 7,892 enlisted soldiers who were members of 104 combat arms companies responded to questionnaire items (75% response rate) concerning their military experiences. Variance in the study outcomes was explained for the most part by individual soldier reports of cohesion rather than soldier reports of cohesion when grouped by company. In addition, cohesion's moderating effect on the relations of stress to study outcomes was observed at the individual, soldier level. Results were consistent with the notion that soldiers' experience of supportive unit leadership and cooperative peer relations, both individually and as a group, build their identification with the unit, lessen the likelihood of their leaving the unit and the Army, and enhance their perceptions of combat readiness. Results and future directions for research are discussed in relation to findings in military and organizational psychology literatures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)
We examined morale as a moderator of the relationship between combat exposure and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in a longitudinal study of U.S. soldiers who had participated in a deployment to Iraq. Soldiers (N = 636) completed assessments at 4 (Time 1) and 10 (Time 2) months following their combat deployment. Combat exposure (both breadth and perceived stressfulness), morale, and PTSD symptoms were assessed at Time 1, and PTSD symptoms were assessed again at Time 2. Results of multivariate multiple regressions revealed that morale at Time 1 interacted with both the breadth and stressfulness of combat exposure to predict PTSD symptoms at both Time 1 and Time 2, even when partialling out the effect of unit support. The slope of the given combat exposure and PTSD symptoms relationship was weaker when reports of morale were higher (with the effect size of the interaction ranging from .01 to .04). The results suggest that morale may buffer soldiers from the negative consequences of combat stressors.
標題：士氣在創傷後壓力症(面對戰鬥類別) 症狀關係中的中介作用
撮要：本縱向研究對象為曾派駐伊拉克的美國士兵(N = 636)，他們分別在派駐後四個月(時間1)和10個月(時間2)完成一系列評估，而本文將闡述士氣在創傷後壓力症(面對戰鬥類別)症狀關係中的中介作用。
「時間1」評估包括面對戰鬥的幅度和壓力感受、士氣和創傷後壓力症狀；而「時間2」只評估創傷後壓力症狀。即使撇除部隊支援的部分，多重多元回歸的結果顯示「時間1」的士氣與面對戰鬥的幅度和壓力感受相互的影響可預測「時間1」和「時間2」的創傷後壓力症狀。當「士氣」高昂時，面對戰鬥與創傷後壓力症狀之間的關係線鈄度會降低(其關係有效值為.01至.04)。研究結果指出士氣可緩衝軍人應對戰鬥壓力的負面影響。
标题：士气在创伤后压力症(面对战斗类别) 症状关系中的中介作用
撮要：本纵向研究对象为曾派驻伊拉克的美国士兵(N = 636)，他们分别在派驻后四个月(时间1)和10个月(时间2)完成一系列评估，而本文将阐述士气在创伤后压力症(面对战斗类别)症状关系中的中介作用。
「时间1」评估包括面对战斗的幅度和压力感受、士气和创伤后压力症状；而「时间2」只评估创伤后压力症状。即使撇除部队支持的部分，多重多元回归的结果显示「时间1」的士气与面对战斗的幅度和压力感受相互的影响可预测「时间1」和「时间2」的创伤后压力症状。当「士气」高昂时，面对战斗与创伤后压力症状之间的关系线钭度会降低(其关系有效值为.01至.04)。研究结果指出士气可缓冲军人应对战斗压力的负面影响。
The training of coaches in developing their mental skills so that they can in turn train athletes to concentrate and improve performance is discussed.
In 1896, Sir Almroth Wright—a colleague and mentor of Sir Alexander Heming, who discovered penicillin—developed a vaccine to protect against typhoid (Susser 1977; see Roberts 1989). The typhoid vaccine was tested in several settings, and on the basis of these tests the vaccine was recommended for routine use in the British army for soldiers at risk for the disease. In that same year, Karl Pearson, the famous biometrician, was asked to examine the empirical evidence bearing on the decision. To do so, he synthesized evidence from five studies reporting data about the relationship between inoculation status and typhoid immunity, and six studies reporting data on inoculation status and fatality among those who contracted the disease. These eleven studies used data from seven independent samples, with four of those being used twice,once in a synthesis of evidence about incidence of typhoid among those inoculated, and once in a synthesis of evidence about death among those contracting typhoid. He computed tetrachoric correlations for each of these eleven cases, and then averaged these correlations (separately for incidence and fatality) to describe average inoculation effectiveness. In his subsequent report of this research, Karl Pearson concluded that the average correlations were too low to warrant adopting the vaccine,since other accepted vaccines at that time routinely produced correlations at or above .20 to .30: "I think the right conclusion to draw would be not that it was desirable to inoculate the whole army, but that improvement of the serum and method of dosing, with a view to a far higher correlation, should be attempted" (1904b, 1245). We tell this story for three reasons. First, we discovered this example when first researching this chapter in 1991,and at the time it was the earliest example of what we would now call a meta-analysis. So it is historically interesting,although a few older examples have now been located.Second, we will use the data in table 14.1 to illustrate how to combine results from fourfold tables. Finally,the study illustrates some conceptual and methodological issues involved in combining estimates of effect size across studies, points we return to in the conclusion of this chapter. In many ways, the capacity to combine results across studies is the defining feature of meta-analysis, so the conceptual and statistical issues involved in computing these combined estimates need careful attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Background:
A number of studies have examined the prevalence and correlates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and related psychiatric conditions in soldiers returning from Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF), but none have examined whether factors such as psychological resilience and social support may protect against these conditions in this population.
Methods:
A total of 272 predominantly older reserve/National Guard OEF/OIF veterans completed a mail survey assessing traumatic stress and depressive symptoms, resilience, and social support.
Results:
Resilience scores in the full sample were comparable to those observed in civilian outpatient primary-care patients. Respondents with PTSD, however, scored significantly lower on this measure and on measures of unit support and postdeployment social support. A hierarchical regression analysis in the full sample suggested that resilience (specifically, increased personal control and positive acceptance of change) and postdeployment social support were negatively associated with traumatic stress and depressive symptoms, even after adjusting for demographic characteristics and combat exposure.
Conclusions:
These results suggest that interventions to bolster psychological resilience and postdeployment social support may help reduce the severity of traumatic stress and depressive symptoms in OEF/OIF veterans.