Guest Editorial Workplace Resilience

Some of the greatest achievements in science have occurred when a model or idea in one discipline has been used in another discipline. Witness the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The GPS on your phone or in your car is a result of scientists attempting to track the Soviet Sputnik spacecraft and an inquisitive manager asking if the process could be reversed to track a submarine from space [1]. This special issue is one step toward a better understanding of workplace resilience and of the several research approaches employed in the workplace. Many papers have been published on resilience concerning high-risk youth, military personnel suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and patients seeking mental health services [2–4]. The insights from those studies have been somewhat informative for researchers seeking to understand the role and behavior of resilience in the workplace. However, the generalizability and applicability of clinical findings to a nonclinical audience highlights the need for more focused research in the work settings where we wish to make changes in human and organizational performance. Why investigate workplace resilience? Recent studies show that the U.S. alone suffers a $5 billion productivity loss because of stress and stress-related conditions [5]. But this research is not necessarily about money, it is about improving the quality of work life and producing better outcomes from our employees. This issue of WORK contains nine contributions covering several aspects of workplace resilience: tools to measure resilience, applications in military training, and resilience in the face of organizational decline and change. The issue opens with a new tool for measuring workplace resilience. This tool updates work done earlier [6] to allow researchers and practitioners to investigate resilience in workplaces. Four factors of resilience were discovered in the current study. While bearing some similarities to the 1997 tool, there were decided differences in the 2016 tool. This first publication of results using the 2016 tool was based on a U.S. sample of healthcare workers. Future studies will extend the use of the tool to manufacturing and service organizations in the U.S. and to organizations throughout the developed world. Military settings offer fertile ground for studying workplace resilience. Commander Frode Voll Mjelde of the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (RNoNA) shares his applied research assessing military team performance in simulator training exercises and in live training exercises. The challenge in this naval environment is to balance teamwork and taskwork. Mjelde and colleague Kip Smith (also of the RNoNA) conducted the studies and found promising results from their simulator training exercises concerning the ability to produce relevant information to assess and train cadets in resilient behaviors. Mjelde and Smith share the details of the realistic training scenarios and what they learned concerning the design of simulator training exercises. Ewart de Visser and his colleagues describe how to build resilience to stress in “Building Resilience with the Stress Resilience Training System: Design, Validation, and Applications.” Their Stress Resilience Training System (SRTS) was originally developed for use with the U.S. military to apply the concept of training for stress to improve one’s resilience to stress. De Visser and colleagues share their work with Heart Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback as an intervention to improve physiological performance and, therefore, produce higher levels of resilience. They discuss the experience and outcomes of using SRTS in applications such as law enforcement, athletics, personal fitness, and healthcare. In “Personal Resilience and Coping with Implications for Work,” Valerie Rice and Boaxia Liu report on their work investigating resilience and coping among active duty service members and veterans in the U.S. Army. Part I of their work shares an extensive literature review concerning resilience and coping. Interestingly, the U.S. military has a resilience training program for soldiers, but coping strategies are neither included nor tied back to resilience. Rice and