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Resilience in organizations denotes system agility and robustness, essential to survival and thriving in increasingly challenging contexts. Contemporary scholarship has acknowledged the relationship between employee resilience and organizational resilience. Yet interventions aimed at developing employee resilience tend to use stress and well-being as proxy resilience indicators, focusing primarily on individual rehabilitation or the development of personal resources. We argue that these interventions should also consider the development of organizational resources that ensure both the inherent and adaptive resilience of employees. This article introduces employee resilience as behavioral capability, signaled by adaptive, learning, and network-leveraging behaviors, and it discusses ways in which supportive organizational contexts enable the development and enactment of these behaviors. The article proposes a series of resilience-building initiatives, embedded in everyday practice, and elucidates how leading and organizing for the development of employee resilience contributes to improved well-being and performance.

The manifold crises that affect businesses, from natural disasters to economic downturn, have stimulated growing interest in building workplace resilience to address them. Consequently, the organizational research has focused on refining risk-management practices and identifying strategies that ensure competitive advantage when adversity occurs. However, recent scholarship suggests that developing organizational resilience also requires investment in employee resilience and that resilience development needn’t be crisis-contingent (e.g., Kuntz, Näswall, & Malinen, 2016; van der Vegt, Essens, Wahlstrom, & George, 2015). Specifically, the view of employee resilience presented here is consistent with a perspective whereby organizations can develop and demonstrate resilience in everyday functioning and small-scale change (i.e., inherent resilience) and also through, and in virtue of, significant crisis events that draw out and even enhance inherent capability (i.e., adaptive resilience; Nilakant et al., 2016). This article discusses current views on employee resilience and specifies how organizations can foster it through a series of resilience-building initiatives grouped in four areas: valuing employees, human-capital development,...