Turning bad into good: How resilience resources protect organizations from demanding work environments

ABSTRACT

An organization’s survival and its performance are often connected to employees’ well-being, which in intensive work conditions can be compromised by employee exhaustion. To date, the last economic crisis has forced several companies to downsize and leave the remaining employees facing higher job demands and vulnerability toward job exhaustion. The present study investigates whether resilience together with other personal resources can function as a psychological shield through a mediation and/or moderation process that mitigate the emergence of burnout. Based on a sample of employees from three different Italian companies (N = 208), our results confirmed that “resilience resources” (i.e., resilience, self-efficacy, self-regulation) mediated the relationship between job demands, exhaustion, and task performance (i.e., energetic process). These results suggest that organizational environments characterized by challenging demands are likely to foster the development of resilience resources to cope with the emergence of potentially harming processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Energetic process
• job demands
• organizational resilience
• personal resources
• task performance

Acknowledgments

The present research study was designed with multiple research purposes and approved by the Ethical Review Committee at the University of Verona. The authors are grateful to the University of Trento, the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL), the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) and the Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL) of Trento for the recognition as one of the best research study in labor sector (2017 edition).