Managing For Resilience

In an era of longer hours and shorter contracts, of tighter margins and frequent organizational change, stress can undermine both the mental health and performance of employees. A culture of resilience in the workplace, however, offers the potential to support psychological wellbeing and improve the performance of both people and organizations. This is the first book to provide managers with a guide to fostering psychological resilience within their teams. It synthesises not only the latest cutting-edge research in the area, but also translates this into practical advice for a range of organizational settings. Chapters cover the following important issues: Key personality factors related to resilience How job design and routines can improve employee resilience How to build a resilient team Communicating change and improving teamwork Modelling resilient thinking and behaviour as a leader Selecting the right resilience training for your organisation This is the ideal book for anyone interested in fostering a high-performance and emotionally resilient workforce, whether they are a manager, HR professional or occupational psychologist. Its cutting edge approach will also make it important reading for students and researchers of organizational and occupational psychology.

As the pace of change continues to increase, resilience has become an even more critical life skill for surviving and thriving in turbulent organizations. This book contains 21 essential keys to help you better anticipate, understand, absorb, and adapt to the changes you and your organization face now and in the years to come. Each of these is based on years of solid observation and research involving thousands of people in hundreds of organizations.

Imagine if we stopped trying to “manage” the stress in our workplaces and personal lives. What if we recognized, instead, that the challenges we face every day could actually make us stronger, smarter, and more successful. We wouldn’t feel victimized by the stress in our lives; with a change in how we view these challenges, we become capable of resolving them and winning the day. Global businesses, governments, and communities are profoundly changing their approaches to adversity and challenges. The Resilience Advantage reveals the techniques and methodology we all can apply in our workplaces and homes. Filled with professional and personal stories, pragmatic research, powerful case studies, and practical actionable tools, this book IS the formula to help each of us turn our challenges into our Resilience Advantage.

This book employs a multidisciplinary and multi-level perspective to understand how well-being and resilience can influence innovation in knowledge-intensive contexts. Building on the authors’ work in the areas of innovation management, human resource management and the psychological aspects of employee well-being, rich empirical data is presented and analysed in order to develop a conceptual framework. An interdisciplinary and insightful read for those studying HRM, innovation and psychology, this book is aimed at scholars who are interested in examining the relationships between micro- (individual) and meso-level (organisational and managerial practices) influences on innovation outcomes.

Modern organizational crises are complex, diverse, and frequent. Ineffective crisis management can result in catastrophic loss. Crisis Management: Resilience and Change introduces students to best practices for preventing, containing, and learning from crises in our global, media-driven society. While covering the strengths of existing works on crisis management, such as systems, leadership, communication, and stakeholder perspective, this innovative new text goes beyond to include global, ethical, change, and emotional aspects of crisis communication. Using her proven transformative crisis management framework, Sarah Kovoor-Misra illustrates how organizations of all sizes can be adaptable, proactive, resilient, and ethical in the face of calamity.

Organizing for Resilience provides a fresh and novel insight into research on how leaders can prepare their organizations to face up to shocks and disruptions in a turbulent and unpredictable world. It provides an analysis of the topic of organizational resilience in a comprehensive and integrative way, with fresh theoretical and research implications as well as important implications for leaders. The first book to synthesize themes from across a spectrum of resilience using the metaphor of a ‘resilience landscape’, chapters in Part I are devoted to five analytical levels: individual level resilience; small firms in which major disruption can threaten survival; large firms with disruptions in one part of the organization; large firms facing enterprise-wide disruption; and disruption to a complete community or economic ecosystem of individuals and organizations. Cases and practice insights are presented to bring the topics to life, allowing reflection and debate at each level. In Part II, the construct of the ‘resilience landscape’ is developed, along with a discussion on leadership for resilience by instilling a resilience mind-set and developing capabilities in relational resilience. The book is ideally suited to bachelor’s and master’s degree courses on strategy, organizational behaviour and leadership. PhD and DBA researchers in the field of resilience and strategy will also find the book useful, as will practising consultants and business leaders.

Given the increasing uncertainty due to catastrophic climate events, terrorist attacks, and economic crises, this book addresses planning for resilience by focusing on sharing knowledge among policy-makers, urban planners, emergency teams and citizens. Chapters look at the nature of contemporary risks, the widespread of resilience thinking and the gap between the theoretical conception and the practices. The book explores how resilience implies a change in planning practices, highlighting the need for flexibility in terms of procedures, and for dynamism in the knowledge systems and learning processes that are the main tools for interaction among different actors and scales. Given its breadth of coverage, the book offers a valuable resource for both academic readers (spatial planners, geographers, social scientists) and practitioners (policymakers, citizens’ associations).

Ecological resilience provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how complex systems adapt to and recover from localized disturbances like hurricanes, fires, pest outbreaks, and floods, as well as large-scale perturbations such as climate change. Ecologists have developed resilience theory over the past three decades in an effort to explain surprising and nonlinear dynamics of complex adaptive systems. Resilience theory is especially important to environmental scientists for its role in underpinning adaptive management approaches to ecosystem and resource management. Foundations of Ecological Resilience is a collection of the most important articles on the subject of ecological resilience—those writings that have defined and developed basic concepts in the field and help explain its importance and meaning for scientists and researchers. The book’s three sections cover articles that have shaped or defined the concepts and theories of resilience, including key papers that broke new conceptual ground and contributed novel ideas to the field; examples that demonstrate ecological resilience in a range of ecosystems; and articles that present practical methods for understanding and managing nonlinear ecosystem dynamics. Foundations of Ecological Resilience is an important contribution to our collective understanding of resilience and an invaluable resource for students and scholars in ecology, wildlife ecology, conservation biology, sustainability, environmental science, public policy, and related fields.