Resilience against stress at the workplace

Chairs: Dr. Matthias Weiss, Institute for Leadership and Organization, & Prof. Dr. Jörn Hurtienne, Psychological Ergonomics

Brief Description: Today`s business environment is characterized by intense competition and constant change. Consequently, organizations, teams and employees have to deal with the permanent requirement to adapt to these changes. In this setting, personal resilience, defined as the dynamic process encompassing individuals’ positive adaptation after adversity, becomes an essential concept to understand and investigate how to enable actors to respond to those challenges.  While the concept of personal resilience addresses important issues in organizational design and management, considerable inconsistencies in definitions and conceptualization still exist. These inconsistencies, however, pose a severe hindrance to advance our understanding of personal resilience at the workplace. Therefore, together with the workshop participants, we would like to work out the core elements of personal resilience in workplace contexts. Central questions include which conditions are important to support personal resilience, and whether negative side effects should be considered when dealing with personal resilience as a desirable attribute. Definitions, ideas and examples from the participants as well as our own experiences shall build the basis of this conceptual work.  In a second step, we would like to take a look at an issue that comes along with resilience but that has not been addressed in previous studies. Research on resilience used to focus on a single unit of analysis, mainly on the individual level. However, because of the embeddedness of individual employees in teams and organizations, many interdependencies exist that affect the resilience of groups and individuals. We would like to explore these interdependencies and discuss how they are shaped and how they influence resilience.  In the workshop we will apply creative and interactive methods, such as the 365°-method, mind mapping and interactive plenary discussions with the aim to arrive at new perspectives about the resilience concept.  

1.      Carolin Blum, Psychological Ergonomics, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany, (e-mail: carolin.blum@uni-wuerzburg.de)

2.      Silja Hartmann, Institute for Leadership and Organization, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, (e-mail: hartmann@bwl.lmu.de)

3.      Prof. Dr. Jörn Hurtienne,Psychological Ergonomics, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany, (e-mail: joern.hurtienne@uni-wuerzburg.de)

4.      Dr. Matthias Weiss, Institute for Leadership and Organization, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, (e-mail: weiss@bwl.lmu.de),

5.      Prof. Dr. Martin Hoegl, Institute for Leadership and Organization, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany ,E-Mail: ilo@bwl.lmu.de