EAPSI:Investigating the Role of Organizational Identification and Collective Support in Fostering Workplace Resilience

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As most individuals and collectives will experience challenges throughout their lives, including shared crises (e.g. terrorist attacks, natural disasters), learning how these negative experiences can be linked to adaptive outcomes may be beneficial to all. More specifically, as organizational membership is a crucial element in the lives of many, investigating the role organizations can play in recovery offers relevant knowledge. The current research will investigate resilience in the workplace following shared adversity by examining the potential for reaching desired end states through the use of organizational identification and collective support. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Joana Kuntz, a noted expert on employee and organizational resilience and founder of the Employee Resilience Research Group (EmpRes), at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand. New Zealand serves as the ideal location to examine collective adversity and organizational resilience, as many organizations are currently undergoing the ?Canterbury Rebuild? due to recent earthquake devastation. Such shared adversities, paired with the expanding business industry, make New Zealand a unique and ideal place to investigate current hypotheses and also an area that may benefit greatly from research findings.The current work integrates resilience research with other theoretical frameworks (i.e. social identity theory, organizational behavior, and occupational health) in an attempt to go beyond individual-level factors and examine multilevel effects that can be used to inform research and recovery efforts. This investigation is novel and also potentially useful because it will examine collective and organizational factors that may assist workers, especially those who would likely not ?bounce back? from experienced hardships. This work aims to further the promise of resilience research to redress human suffering by extending previous findings to collective adversity and incorporating an examination of the organizational resources that can assist groups and individuals in coping with collective strain. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Royal Society of New Zealand.