Resilience interventions at work: Questions that need answering

Objectives: There is a growing interest in workplace resilience interventions. Yet, the resilience literature provides little guidelines as to how to design workplace resilience interventions. What may have hindered the development of general guidelines for resilience interventions, is a lack of common ground among scientists on the meaning of psychological resilience. The aim of this study is to find common ground for resilience interventions, while doing justice to the different meanings and conceptualizations of resilience.
Method: To accomplish this, we chose not to develop guidelines, but rather formulate basic questions that need answering in designing resilience interventions. We derived these questions from a narrative review of the resilience literature. We consecutively reviewed the terminology, definition, conceptualization and operationalization of resilience with a focus on psychological resilience in the workplace.
Results: The result of this review is a list of twelve basic questions that need answering to better underpin resilience interventions. We applied these questions to five resilience coaching interventions, which resulted in the formulation of four minimal criteria to distinguish a resilience intervention from other types of interventions that may have an impact on resilience.
Conclusion: Both researchers and practitioners could use these criteria and basic questions to improve on designing, describing, selecting, reviewing and applying resilience interventions at work.