Responses to Destructive Organizational Contexts:
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Workers’ communication may be situated at the microlevel as individuals
productively frame and suggest interventions for bullying, incivilities, sexual
harassment, and job loss.
Communication also constitutes macrolevel processes as organizations
anticipate or remedy the aftermath of terrorist attacks, tsunamis, mining
disasters, student deaths by gunfire, and other situations.
Resilience has been viewed in various ways:
o A trait that only certain people or families possess.
o A quality that emerges over time.
o A process of sustaining hardship.
o The human capacity to recover from tragedy in personal and
professional lives.
People from the same genetic pool may respond quite differently to the
identical circumstances.
As a quality, resilience is a “way of facing and understanding the world, that
is deeply etched into a person’s mind and soul.”
As a process, it is a series of iterative attempts to locate meaning, normalcy,
and productive identities and identifications in order to rebound or
reintegrate from difficult life experiences.
Resilience is both a quality and a process constituted and reconstituted
through interactions and intersubjective sensemaking.
Resilience is a “process of reintegrating from disruptions in life.”
Redirect our attention to communicative constructions that enable people to
rebound from destructive experiences.
o Resilience Theory and Research in Diverse Contexts:
 Construct of resilience has been defined in several ways
without agreement regarding:
 The age domain covered by the construct.
 The circumstances where it occurs.
 Its definition.
 Its boundaries.
 The adaptive behaviors described.
 Highlight the positive nature of outcomes in conditions
perceived as adverse: “a dynamic process encompassing
positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity;”
“a phenomenon characterized by good outcomes in spite of
serious threats to adaptation or development;” “a capacity or
characteristic to maintain positive adjustment or even thrive
under adverse conditions;” and “successful outcomes under
conditions of adversity.”
 Other conceptualizations focus strategies for dealing with
potentially destructive situations as “positive adaptation in the
context of significant risk or adversity” and “a process or
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phenomenon reflecting positive . . . adjustment despite
conditions of risk.”
Resilience as “an ongoing process of garnering resources that
enables the individual to negotiate current issues adaptively
and provides a foundation for dealing with subsequent
challenges.”
 Specify the negative triggering event or situation,
mediating processes for dealing with it including
remedial identity work and positive outcome(s).
 Actors intersubjectively construct resilience primarily
when faced with significant threat, risk, or adversity.
 The resulting positive adaptation, recovery, or
reintegration are hallmarks of resilience.
 Adapted this basic model and explored the relationships
among resilience and human development, stress
responses, agency, and negotiation of self-definition.
Protective factors “moderate the effects of individual
vulnerabilities or environmental hazards, so that a given
developmental trajectory reflects more adaptation in a given
domain than would be the case if protective processes were
not operating.”
 Factors range from individual attributes to broader life
experiences or conditions.
 Individual factors include:
o Person-specific differences in cognitive abilities
and self-perceptions.
o Self-regulation skills.
o Relationships.
o Connections to prosocial, rule-abiding peers and
community resources and opportunities.
 Socioeconomic status as a protective factor – multiple
protective factors exist at the individual, family, and
community levels.
 These factors “appear to transcend ethnic, social class
and geographic boundaries”
Resilience development is an act of human agency.
 An adaptive process whereby the individual willingly
makes use of internal and external resources to
overcome adversity or threats to development.
 Resilient youth are defined not as individuals who
possess a unique quality called “resilience” but rather as
individuals who have overcome adversity through the
resilience process.
Four domains of resilience in adolescent females:
 Social processes or relationships.
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Emotional processes or the awareness and expression
of feelings.
 Cognitive processes and feelings of personal control
over their lives.
 Purposeful action, the perceptions of engaging in goaldirected behavior leading to greater independence, new
behaviors, hope for their futures, and positive identities.
 A constructionist approach “reflects a postmodern
interpretation of the construct and defines resilience as the
outcome from negotiations between individuals and their
environments for the resources to define themselves as
healthy amidst conditions collectively viewed as adverse.”
 Race, ethnicity, class, gender, ability, sexual social orientation,
and other points of difference can be plumbed to determine
not only “access to health resources but, at a more fundamental
level, our definition of resilience itself.”
 Some argue that biology can contribute to our understanding
of successful adaptation to adversity.
 A force within everyone that drives them to seek selfactualization, altruism, wisdom, and harmony with a
spiritual source of strength.
 Issues within the domain of positive psychology, a field that
seeks to foster life satisfaction, power sharing, community
contributions, hope, and happiness.
 A yearning to lead meaningful lives replete with hope,
dignity, and compassion.
 Directed attention to human development, stress
reactions, agency, person-environment negotiations,
and biology.
 Scholars view resilience as a process or phenomenon and not
as an individual personality trait.
 Implication in situating blame for “failure” at the
individual level.
 When the individual is (or is not) resilient, then the
individual is personally responsible for his or her ability
or inability to bounce back.
 Resilient trajectories are enormously influence by
processes arising from the family and the wider
environment.
 An adjective describing individuals and recommend its
use only with regard to profile or trajectories because of
the difficulty of untangling causes and responsibilities
of thriving in difficult circumstances.
o Resilience in the Workplace:
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Organizational members experience many workplace
conditions that are adverse, destructive, and detrimental.
 Likely to engender resilient processes, either
individually or collectively – the workplace is an ideal
site to explore the phenomenon.
 Workplaces are embedded in a global world marked by
constant change.
Individuals who are able to brand themselves in a distinctive
and attractive fashion and those who have the necessary
career capital may survive and even flourish in this volatile
contemporary marketplace.
Workplaces may be populated with coworkers, bosses, and
direct reports who are problematic or mildly uncivil at best, or
as abusive, bullying, harassing, and extremely harmful at
worst.
The capacity to manage difficult people and situations depends
on the degree to which targets of undesirable behaviors can
analyze or reframe their experiences, make sense of an
construct alternative narratives, and utilize different logics in
their discourse.
Those who rebound or reintegrate quickly appear capable of
learning how to turn “disruptive changes and conflicts from
potential disasters into growth opportunities.”
The conditions that trigger resilient processes might be
considered career development insofar as resilience is
positively related to actual career changes.
Communicative Constructions of Resilience:
 As organizational members deal with the trauma, doubts, and challenges,
they actively search for and give meaning to their worlds.
 This search involves intersubjective (re)shapings and (re)enactments of
emerging and sometimes contradictory realities.
o Job Loss:
 Individuals dealing with job loss lose not only their jobs but
also their place in the world of work, families, and
communities, as well as ways of organizing the spatio-temporal
contours of their daily lives.
 The consequences of job loss are “generally detrimental to
individuals by virtually any criteria a researcher chooses to
examine.”
 Negative outcomes are particularly obvious when a person is
“let go” or “fired” because of individual performance or office
politics rather than being part of a planned or large-scale
downsizing.
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When persons believe they are to blame and that the
organization has acted justly in the job loss process,
they may experience even greater negative
consequences.
 “The effort we put into ensuring that our private feelings are
suppressed or represented to be in tune with socially accepted
norms.”
 Identity work – workers engage in efforts to invoke plausible
and productive identities or life narratives from an array of
possibilities.
 The difficulty of emotion and identity work can be
characterized in processes of sensemaking, discursive framing,
and performance:
 Individuals who lost their jobs may have difficulty
knowing what to relate, when and to whom to display
concerns, and how to channel effort into creating
acceptable displays.
 During these sensemaking processes, their emotion
work may fall within the disquieting junctures of
private-public and of raw feelings-acceptable feeling
displays.
 Three interrelated themes:
 Foregrounding/backgrounding of emotions.
 Normalcy.
 (Re)instituting of traditional masculinities.
 People intersubjectively create conditions for building on their
capabilities for resilience and engaging in discourses of
resiliency.
 People who experienced job loss constructed resilience by
talking into being and performing positive emotions, a sense
that their lives were normal, and anchoring identities.
 Resilience was neither a fixed attribute of the
individuals or family units nor a desirable outcome but
was a dynamic intersubjective process.
o Irrationalities:
 Organizational interrationalities are everyday practices that
pull organizational members in different, sometimes
competing directions and include phenomena such as paradox,
tension, contradiction, and irony.
 Traditional approaches of organizational scholarship center on
strategies and schemas to limit, constrain, and even erase the
causes and consequences of organizational irrationality.
 Organizational irrationality is not necessarily negative.
 The stuff of organizing.
Often constitutes organizational members’ everyday
understandings of situations, exploring contradictions and
ironies of organizing illustrate another example of how
organizational members construct resiliency.
 Workers faced with such irrationalities create intricate
processes of “working around” the contradictions
embedded in structures, policies, procedures, and
practices, while still adhering to central values and
goals.
 Unlike resilience in the face of a singular event, resilient
responses to organizational irrationality required an ongoing
series of communicative strategies to respond to seemingly
irrational phenomena that are embedded within organizing
itself.
 Resilience became the communicative construction whereby
they created their own organizing logics or conditions
intersubjectively that enabled them to bounce back and
reintegrate during and after especially “crazy” and potentially
detrimental workplace experiences.
o Long-Term Work-Life Tensions:
 Whether people attempt to balance, negotiate, manage, accept
or juggle competing demands for their time, it is clear that
work-life negotiations are a challenge for almost everyone at
some point in their lives.
 These challenges can become even more difficult in the
face of long-term disease or disability.
 Individuals and their family members co-created meanings
that helped them with daily realities of long-term disability and
requirements to be productive workers.
 They constructed resilience in order to reintegrate,
fashion new normalcies, and utilize networks of support
to help the to “bounce back.”
 This resilience enabled them to develop a sense of
efficacy, a belief that they could cope with and
surmount difficulties, and a steadfast recognition of the
reality with which they were faced.
 Being diagnosed with a chronic illness or suffering a physical
trauma that results in a physical disability can be devastating.
 It can require remaking self identity, repositioning into
a new disability culture, and changing personal and
familial relationships.
 The person with the disability or disease is not the only
one affected.
o Entire family structures and community or
workplace interactions change as people must
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learn to navigate their lives without their
“healthy body-selves.”
 Bouncing back from disabling experiences and
diagnoses requires considerable physical and
psychological resilience.
o The efforts of such circumstances extend beyond
the individuals and their personal relationships.
o Typically face career and employment
consequences.
Two interrelated processes dominated the way these families
built resilience: accepting and adapting.
 Both appeared to be necessary for “accomplishing”
resilience.
 Accepting was a crucial and ongoing component of
resilience marked by the cognitive and emotional
“facing down of reality.”
o Focused on holding realistic expectations and
responding accordingly.
o Resilience-as-acceptance meant coming to terms
with the condition.
 Adapting is the process of making adjustments to
respond productively to and rebound successfully from
new life circumstances brought about by disruptions,
tragedies, and crises.
o Families found ways to adjust to their new
circumstances of living with chronic illness or
disability, or being a primary caregiver for a
loved one.
o These adaptations marked vivid ways in which
long-term disease or disability blurred divisions
between organizational lives and private lives.
 Accepting without adapting amounted to resignation
and defeat.
 Adapting without accepting represented denial and only
short-term success.
Finding a silver lining does not necessarily lead to resilience.
 Positive outcomes were absent from these families’ talk
of work-life balance.
 They produced and performed a resilience that faced
realities, socially constructed what those realities were,
adapted to the situation while resisting unproductive
commentary and policies by others, and found
something worthwhile in their experiences.
Resilience in work-life contexts for which disruptions of a
tenuous balance could occur at any moment require ongoing
and complex communication with others in multiple domains
to reintegrate or bounce back on a regular basis.
Conclusion:
 Human actors intersubjectively construct resilience.
o Individuals and collectivities liverally talk and enact resiliency into
being.
 The human resilience relies upon communication to develop capacities and
strategies that enable people to bounce back or reintegrate from destructive
situations.
 Communication facilitates acceptance of realities and construction of new
normalcies that preserve that which participants hold dear.
o Lend dignity and hope to human existence.