The relationship between leader’s behaviours and employee resilience : the moderating roles of personality traits.

Abstract

Resilience is among the increasingly popular topics of interest in the literature. Although rooted in the developmental and clinical literature, there has been an expansion of conceptualisations for this construct from various research streams, including the occupational literature. However, due to the lack of a behaviour-oriented measure of employee-centric resilience, the conceptualisation adapted in the present study refers to employee resilience as developable capacities that can be facilitated by the organisation to positively cope, adapt and thrive in response to continuously changing work environments. Using a recently developed measure of resilience, this study investigated the effects of the two leadership behaviours of empowerment and contingent reward, as well as the moderating roles of dispositional proactivity and optimism as individual differences. Regression analysis on a sample of 369 professionals supported the hypotheses that employee resilience is contingent on the leader’s operational empowerment and on contingent reward behaviours. Results also confirmed the effect of proactivity and optimism in enhancing resilience, and the moderating role of proactive personality in enhancing relation between empowering leadership and follower’s resilience. Outcomes of the study were also discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications, and recommendations were made for future research into the topic.