A Meta-Analysis of Resilience in the Workplace

Resilience is a potentially important factor for stress management, well-being, and success in the workplace. Consistent with this, there is a growing literature base on resilience at work. At the same time, there remains confusion and inconsistency about basic issues such as how to conceptualize resilience and the nature of resilience-outcome relationships. This meta-analysis focused on three distinct conceptualizations of individual-level resilience (i.e., capacity, enactment, demonstration), as well as their associations with valued workplace outcomes (i.e., performance, job attitudes, psychological well-being, physical health) and further considered potential moderators of these relationships. Overall, based on an examination of 279 primary sources including 297 independent samples (total N = 432,458), it was found that the three resilience components generally exhibited positive associations with each other and with four outcome domains. Several moderating variables were examined, including the focus of resilience measurement, presence of adversity, occupational risk, outcome source, and publication status; unexplained variability in resilience-outcome relationships remained even after accounting for these factors. The authors discuss the implications of these findings and provide suggestions for future research.