The Global pandemic (Covid-19) is a health crisis that has not only accelerated the changing nature of work but has largely threatened employees’ interpersonal relationships. Covid 19 continues to be stressful for individual workers given a significant shift in their lives and livelihood (Hu, He and Zhou, Reference Hu, He and Zhou2020) and an overwhelming degree of uncertainty and anxiety. Indeed, Grant and Wade-Benzoni (Reference Grant and Wade-Benzoni2009) suggest that exposure to death (e.g., through the covid pandemic) may activate anxiety, self-protective and withdrawal behaviors while minimising engagement (see also Sliter, Sinclair, Yuan & Mohr, Reference Sliter, Sinclair, Yuan and Mohr2014). These, in turn, culminate into employee physical and emotional stress and poor mental health and wellbeing. There are suggestions that resiliency and leadership may be able to buffer the stress and uncertainty that are associated with organisational crisis, turbulence, and disruptions more broadly. Thus, in this issue (Issue 27.3), we assemble papers that provide differing perspectives on resiliency and leadership in organisations. In these articles, authors reflect on a variety of issues such as: antecedence and consequences of resiliency, complaint system, knowledge behaviours, happiness at work, organizational evolvability, leadership (transformation, servant, and shared) and the connection between supervisor's incivility and presenteeism.
We begin with the articles on the theme of resilience. Positive psychologists (e.g., Masten and Reed, Reference Masten and Reed2002) describe resiliency as “a class of phenomena characterised by patterns of positive adaptation in the context of significant adversity or risk” (pg. 75). These risks may include everyday-life risk that vary from potential illness, leading to a loss of loved one, economic instability, or micro-level internal threats such as harassment or missing a career-threatening deadline on a project (Luthans, Vogelgesang, Lester, Reference Luthans, Vogelgesang and Lester2006). While resiliency may be trait-like or dispositional, we know that it is also state-like and open to development (see Coutu, Reference Coutu2002).
The first paper, “Deconstructing organizational resilience: A multiple case study” by Börekçi, Rofcanin, Heras and Berber, extends the resiliency field by focusing on relational and operational dimensions of resilience. Using multiple case study approach, the authors analysed complementary contributions of relational and operational resilience on organisational resilience especially in survival and sustainability dimensions. In this respect, the authors developed and refined a conceptual model which argued that relational resilience and operational resilience in survival and sustainable dimensions have a role to play in organisational resiliency.
In the next paper, “How to emerge stronger: Antecedents and consequences of organizational resilience”, Rodríguez-Sánchez, Guinot Chiva and López-Cabrales, analyse the role of corporate social responsibility towards employees (CSRE) in the promotion of resilience at work, and how resilience results in organizational learning capability (OLC) and firm performance. Employing structural equation modelling to test the research model with a sample of 296 companies from different sectors, the authors found that CSRE had a positive influence on organizational resilience. This, in turn, affected firm performance via OLC. Altogether, the paper empirically identified the antecedents and consequences of organisational resilience. The practical implications of the results for human resource management activities were discussed.
Resilience is related to happiness at work (Cohn, Fredrickson, Brown, Mikels and Conway, Reference Cohn, Fredrickson, Brown, Mikels and Conway2009). We are aware that happiness has important consequences for both individuals and organizations (Fisher, Reference Fisher2010). Indeed, Cohn and colleagues argue that happiness, which is a sum of life satisfaction, coping resources and positive emotions, predicts desirable outcomes (e.g., financial success, supportive relationships, and health and longevity). Based on the broad and build theory (Fredrick, Reference Fredrickson2001), these authors also found that positive emotions predicted increased resilience and life satisfaction. Nevertheless, the measurement of happiness has been problematic (Fisher, Reference Fisher2010). This is the challenge that the authors of our next paper tackled head on. In this paper, “Happiness at work: Developing a shorter measure”, Salas-Vallina and Alegre argue that despite the existence of different constructs that capture positive attitudes, a comprehensive measure of individual-level happiness is necessary because shorter scales provide improvements in efficiency and efficacy. Following the Stanton, Sinar, Balzer, and Smith (Reference Stanton, Sinar, Balzer and Smith2002) and Kacmar, Crawford, Carlson, Ferguson, and Whitten (Reference Kacmar, Crawford, Carlson, Ferguson and Whitten2014), the authors developed a shortened version of the happiness at work scale while maintaining its psychometric properties. The new scale offers a high statistical potential to capture positive attitudes at work and opens undeveloped research possibilities and a potential to change organisational culture (Miller, Devlin, Buys, & Donoghue, Reference Miller, Devlin, Buys and Donoghue2020). Moving forward, more research is needed in measuring happiness at different levels such as transient, person, unit, and organizational levels (see Fisher, Reference Fisher2010).
Still under the theme of resiliency, in the paper “Organizational antecedents to designing a comprehensive complaint management system”, Phabmixay, Rodríguez-Escudero and Rodríguez-Pinto investigate the influence of organizational culture variables (the extent to which the firm is customer and innovation oriented) and the nature of the objectives pursued by complaint handling (defensive vs. improvement objectives). The proposed model was tested on a sample of 140 manufacturing firms. The authors found that these antecedents shaped the complaint management system in a diverse and significant manner. Overall, the effective management of a complaint system should minimise stress that may potentially complicate resilience in organisations.
Organisational support is known to alleviate stress (Tucker, Reference Tucker2015) that may deplete resiliency. Perceived organisational support is the subject of the next paper by Alnaimi and Rjoub albeit in a slightly different way. Specifically, the paper “Perceived organizational support, psychological entitlement, and extra-role behavior: The mediating role of knowledge hiding behavior” improves our understanding of the impact of perceived organisational support on knowledge hiding- a counterproductive behaviour that may harm employees’ interpersonal relationship with respect to innovation (see Connelly & Zweig, Reference Connelly and Zweig2015). The authors drew on psychological ownership and social exchange theory as well as survey data collected from 375 employees in Jordanian commercial banks to explore the relationship between the variables of interest in their study. They found that perceived organizational support had a positive impact on extra-role behaviour, knowledge hiding behaviour had a negative impact on extra-role behaviour, and psychological entitlement had a positive impact on knowledge hiding behaviour, and (4) knowledge hiding behaviour mediated the relationship between psychological entitlement and extra-role behaviour. Future research should continue to dig deeper into the relationship between organisational support, extra role behaviour and organisational resilience.
Altogether, the debate on organizational resilience in JMO continues to wax stronger. Kantur and Seri-Say published a conceptual integrative framework on organisational resilience earlier with us (see Kantur & Iseri-Say, Reference Kantur and İşeri-Say2012). Specifically, in their integrative framework on organisational resilience, they introduced a new outcome concept of organizational evolvability, emphasizing the heightened sensitivity and increased wisdom of the post-event organization that aimed to strengthen organizational resilience research for richer theoretical and empirical progress. Along the same lines, Brunetto, Dick, Xeri and Cully (2020) employed Appreciative Inquiry as a lens to identify the process for building on employee existing wellbeing using the discovery, dreaming, designing, and achieving destiny process.
The second theme in this issue is leadership. Leadership and decision making are critical for organisational functioning. For example, several studies have examined the role of differing leadership styles on employee behaviours during crisis. In this respect, Hu et al., (Reference Hu, He and Zhou2020) demonstrated that servant leadership is critical in guiding employee with state anxiety. Similarly, Usdin (Reference Usdin2014) showed that effective leaders promote resiliency using democratic, diffused decision making, stressing intra-dependence, and promoting individual agency and locally informed decisions. Such leaders build on networks and cultural bonds and are continuously, ready, and flexible. The next paper in this issue is on the role of transformational leadership in employee engagement -a concept that is crucial for crisis management (salim Saji, Reference Salim Saji2014).
In the paper “Employees’ self-determined motivation, transformational leadership and work engagement”, Chua and Ayoko drew on the self-determined theory of motivation, to build and test a theoretical model linking employees’ perceptions of transformational leadership with engagement through an intervening variable of differing aspects of employees’ self-determined motivation. Data from a sample of 155 participants revealed that employees’ perceptions of transformational leadership were positively related to employees’ self-determined motivation (intrinsic, autonomous, and controlled) and work engagement. Specifically, self-determined motivation (intrinsic, autonomous) was positively linked with work engagement, while intrinsic, autonomous, and controlled dimensions of self-determined motivation mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and work engagement. The theoretical and practical implications of the results were discussed.
Also, Oyet investigates the dark side of leadership (Liu, Liao and Loi, Reference Liu, Liao and Loi2012) and especially how employees may constitute themselves as targets of supervisor incivility in the paper, “Investigating experienced supervisor incivility: Does presenteeism play a role?” Drawing from Victim Precipitation Theory, and Conservation of Resources Theory, the author argued that engaging in presenteeism will be positively associated with experienced supervisor incivility, and that presentees’ experienced productivity loss will mediate this relationship. Furthermore, presentees’ self-efficacy and perceived control (personal and condition resources, respectively) was hypothesised as boundary conditions of the presenteeism–productivity loss relationship such that presentees high in each resource will be less likely to experience supervisor incivility. The results showed that experienced productivity loss mediated the positive relationship between presenteeism and experienced supervisor incivility. Additionally, self-efficacy moderated the presenteeism–productivity loss relationship; but the relationship was stronger for low self-efficacy presentees. This increased the likelihood of experiencing supervisor incivility.
Next, Zeier, Plimmer and Franken, in their paper “Developing shared leadership in a public organisation: Process, paradoxes and consequences” interrogate the link between identity formation and the subsequent development of shared leadership. They focused on how a programme to develop shared leadership changed a public science organisation, from one dependent on hierarchical leadership, to one that employed shared leadership to better address the complex public context. Using Day and Harrison's levels of leadership identity framework, this study first examined the processes of a development programme at individual, relational, and collective levels. Results revealed cascading growth in leadership identities through processes such as job crafting and contagion. Additionally, the inherent paradoxes of power, goals, and attitude underlying shared leadership development were identified. Within these paradoxes, tensions between vertical hierarchy versus dispersed networks, task performance versus job crafting, fatigue versus revitalisation, and cynicism versus evangelism were found.
In the article, “Enabling the engine of workplace thriving through servant leadership: The moderating role of core self-evaluations”, Usman, Liu, Li, Zhang, Ghani, and Gul examine the connection between thriving, servant leadership and core-self-evaluation. Data were collected at three points in time from 260 professionals across diverse functional backgrounds and industries. The results confirmed an indirect effect from Servant Leadership to workplace thriving via agentic work behaviors. Importantly, the moderation results demonstrated that the relationship between servant leadership and workplace thriving was stronger when individuals have high employee core-self-evaluations. Implications for theory and practice were discussed.
The last article in the current issue revolves around ethical leadership. In this paper, “A leader indeed is a leader in deed: The relationship of ethical leadership, person–organization fit, organizational trust, and extra-role service behavior”, Kerse test a multilevel model. The findings demonstrated that ethical leadership strengthened the trust in the organization both directly and over person–organization fit while ethical leadership increased extra-role service behavior by means of organizational trust. The theoretical and practical implications of all the findings were discussed and evaluated in the context of national culture.
To conclude, there is evidence that the lack of leadership qualities in times of crisis and disasters (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic), is often associated with poor disaster response (Valero, Jung, and Andrew, Reference Valero, Jung and Andrew2015). There is also a high potential for breakdowns in organisational functional systems in such times. This is because functioning systems that maintain the organization and even communities are overwhelmed with increased demands that usually outweighs the capacity of the system (see Usdin, Reference Usdin2014). In this respect, distributive leadership (i.e., a “shared, social influence process …. to structure activities and relationships in a group or organization” (Wright, Reference Wright2008, p. 3) was found to be a co-influencer with resiliency in the post-Katrina New Orleans. Similarly, transformational leadership was reported to have a positive and significant effect on perceived organisational resiliency (Valero, et al., Reference Valero, Jung and Andrew2015). Valero and associates found that respondents who perceived their leaders to exhibit transformational leadership style also perceived their organizations to be highly resilient.
Additionally, studies in resistance to organisational change show that leadership acts as an input at multiple levels, influencing organizational outcomes both directly especially by continuously shaping employee attitude throughout change while indirectly regulating the antecedents and moderators of their predisposition to change (Valero et al., Reference Valero, Jung and Andrew2015; Applebaum, Degbe, MacDonald and Nguyen-Quang, Reference Appelbaum, Degbe, MacDonald and Nguyen-Quang2015). The above findings combine to suggest that leadership plays a critical role in resilience at the individual, team, and organisational levels. Future research should continue to tease out the relationship between leadership and resiliency and at multiple levels.
