Keywords

Resilience in the Public Sector

Employee resilience is essential in public sector organizations, particularly when demands are high and difficult to meet, and when the environment is uncertain and continually evolving. Also, many public sector jobs can be characterized by high, ambiguous, and often competing demands and ever-changing circumstances; a context where continuous learning, collaboration and adaptability are essential. Employee resilience, and its development, are therefore particularly salient in this context (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011).

In viewing resilience as developable, it is not a fixed trait but instead is a dynamic capability at the individual level, in which employees ‘innovate, adapt to change’, and, arguably, ‘create change’ (Teece et al., 2016, p. 18). This focus on reciprocal interactions with the environment during both day-to-day challenges, as well as crises, blurs the distinction between ex-ante and ex-post resilience. This is because it assumes the requirement to be resilient to change is continuous in many KIOs, and that in order to adapt in crisis, a culture where employees can develop their resilience in more routine circumstances, is required.

Earlier views of individual resilience considered it as a personality trait, similar to constructs like grit, hardiness, and the ability to bounce back from hardship (Bonanno, 2004; Credé, et al., 2017; Richardson, 2002). The more modern view of resilience concerns ‘a key capability enabling employees to manage and adapt to continually changing circumstances’ (Näswall et al., 2019, p. 353). This contemporary understanding concerns the individual's capacity to engage with work-related personal, social and contextual resources, and therefore acknowledges the person–environment interaction in resilience development (Näswall et al., 2019; Pangallo et al., 2015). It sees resilience as involving particular capabilities that allow individuals ‘to adapt to challenges and seek out opportunities for continuous improvement’ (Näswall et al., 2019, p. 354).

The broader interpersonal system of workplaces shapes resilience. Resilience development involves a constant interaction between an individual and their work context (Mansfield et al., 2014). Leadership, social support and workplace climate and culture, for instance, play important enabling and motivating roles (Cooper et al., 2019; Khan et al., 2019; Kuntz et al., 2016; Nguyen et al., 2016). In turn, the development and enactment of resilience reciprocally contributes to the collective capacity of a workforce’s overall resilience.

We adopt a definition of employee resilience as ‘the capacity of employees to utilise resources to continually adapt and flourish at work, even when faced with challenging circumstances’ (Kuntz et al., 2016, p. 460). It consists of employee behaviours associated with learning, adaptability and collaboration. This definition aligns well to the framework adopted in this volume. Resilience here can be both an independent and dependent variable, and likely works in both linear and non-linear ways. It can be influenced by workplace contextual factors, such as leadership (Nguyen et al., 2016), and is related to outcomes, such as job satisfaction, engagement (Näswall et al., 2019) and wellbeing (Tonkin et al., 2018).

Resilient behaviours can lead to, or include, making both radical and small incremental changes. The behaviours can also be either proactive (ex-ante) or reactive (ex-post). Logically, these behaviours also provide a way of dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty. With resilience, smaller day-to-day challenges build capacity to deal with larger crises. In resilience enabling workplaces, people are aware of what is happening, are managing vulnerabilities, and adapt and respond accordingly (Lee et al., 2013; Mallak, 1998). Consequently, they achieve desirable outcomes, despite ‘adversity, strain, and significant barriers to adaptation or development’ (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003, p. 94). When a workplace is healthy and resilient, its people can effectively prepare for, survive and thrive in challenging environments (Lee et al., 2013; Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007). Notably, our conceptualization of resilience does not necessitate a severe disruption or a crisis for resilience to be enacted; rather, resilient responses can be developed and used during routine times (Kuntz et al., 2016).

Public sector managers play a pivotal role in enabling employee resilience. Managers can support employee resilience through mechanisms such as modelling, social exchange, task allocation, process determination and the setting of rewards (Nguyen et al., 2016; Franken, 2019). More specifically, leadership behaviours influence daily interactions between the employee and manager, and these constant interactions shape resilience development, both in good and in bad ways. For example, when managers back staff, foster their growth and build the whole team, employee resilience grows (Franken, 2019). In contrast, micromanagement and poor support for learning and development undermine resilience (Franken & Plimmer, 2019).

This chapter begins with a brief description of the research method, followed by an overview of public sector context and the need for resilience. We then move to a discussion on the behaviours associated with employee resilience capability, followed by recommendations for developing growth-oriented leadership to enable this capability. This chapter concludes with a discussion on resilience-enabling leadership, its relation to the public sector and its values, and its significance in preparing for the future of work.

Method

In this chapter we draw on our series of studies in the New Zealand public sector to describe and explain how employee resilience can be enabled by public sector managers. Specifically we draw on 26 interviews and two focus groups undertaken in 2017 and 2018 with New Zealand public servants and line managers (n = 33). Participants came from the areas of commerce, auditing, policy and operations, reflecting the occupational diversity of New Zealand’s wider public service (State Services Commission, 2019). Initial interview information (n = 20) was collected using the critical incident technique, and subsequently analysed using Saldaña’s (2015) causation coding technique—to pinpoint the mechanisms through which certain leadership behaviours can impact resilience. These interviews were completed once saturation was reached (Guest et al., 2006). The final six interviews and the focus groups were used for validating the preliminary results.

Public Sector Environments and Need for Resilience

Public services are increasingly both expanded and dispersed, and public organizations are consequently forced to take a more networked approach to organizational structures and decision-making (Stoker, 2006). These new networked approaches often consist of collaborative processes both within and between organizations, that can include private organizations and stakeholders. The challenge is for public organizations to stay aligned and accountable to democratic laws and public values, while also exercising more discretion to allow for effective collaboration and innovation (Bryson et al., 2014; Plimmer et al., 2017a).

The networked approaches mean that stakeholder relationships are more frequent, deeper and dynamic. They are also often situated in turbulent and trying conditions. Although governments and societies understandably expect workforces to meet these challenging demands, unfortunately employee capability is often missing in these discussions (Plimmer et al., 2017a). Instead, public administration reforms have often focussed on organizational and institutional structure, performance management, the use of market structures, and appropriate incentives (Bach & Bordogna, 2011; Christensen et al., 2007; Hood, 2006). Human resource capability has not really featured, despite its potential (Plimmer et al., 2017b). Individual level, workplace relevant behaviours that concern interactions with the environment have not been sufficiently studied, despite them being the fractals from which group and organizational level capabilities might grow (Hall et al., 2016).

One response to rising demands on public agencies has been to shift from centralized, bureaucratic forms of public administration to more decentralized, market-driven methods of organizing (Bryson et al., 2014). These trends have intensified work, with not just longer hours, but also the proportion of effective labour performed for each hour (Cameron, 1998; Green, 2004). Increased pressure and controls, cultures that expect compliance and negative behaviours such as bullying now also seem too common (Omari & Paull, 2015; Plimmer et al., 2017c). These changes put pressure on workers (Christensen & Lægreid, 2011a): ‘many large-scale reforms that have occurred in the public sector have involved a loss of resources, especially in terms of people, time, and budgetary support’ (Noblet et al., 2006, p. 338). Clearly public sector organizations are faced with a need for both tight and innovative resource use to cope with increasingly complex demands. This ever-changing context demands a resilient workforce:

We have the constant challenge that there’s always churn and change so that does push us to, “Either you’re resilient or you’re not,” and there’s an element of that that comes through so some people find policy is not for them pretty quickly, but those who can survive … well if you survive the first 12 months, you’ll be fine! [Interview—Manager]

Public sector organizations are both hierarchical bureaucracies and paradoxically, often decentralized and networked, increasingly resembling hybrid organizations (Fossestøl et al., 2015). Leadership can occur at any level of an organization, and many positional leaders lead in ways that support resilience (Zeier et al., 2018). Some, however, do not (Franken, 2019).

Resilient Employee Behaviours

There are many conceptualisations of resilience, but the one adopted for this research is that employee resilience is centred on three core behaviours: network leveraging, learning and adaptability (Kuntz et al., 2017). These behaviours are not discrete, rather they relate to and build on each other, and also interact with the work environment to protect and acquire job and personal resources, such as connections, feelings of competence, and control.

For example, working well with others (network leveraging) supports learning through the flourishing of new, and diverse, ideas. Being adaptable can also help learning, as new repertoires are practiced. Adaptable people often work better with others (O'Connell et al., 2008). These three behaviours can also help in the acquisition of other resources, such as skills and connections (Hobfoll, 2011). Resilient behaviours thus bolster one’s ability to deal with challenges and crises effectively.

Combined, these behaviours represent ‘the capacity of employees to utilise resources to continually adapt and flourish at work, even when faced with challenging circumstances’ (Kuntz et al., 2016, p. 460). Resilient behaviours are separate from, but precede, attitudes such as job satisfaction, engagement, commitment and wellbeing (Brennan, 2017; Näswall et al., 2019; Tonkin et al., 2018; Youssef & Luthans, 2007).

The core behaviour of network-leveraging consists of effective collaboration between colleagues, sharing knowledge and information and cooperating across teams, networks and functions (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011; Uzzi, 1997). These behaviours help people access and exchange resources, which in turn makes dealing with challenge and crises easier (Mitchell et al., 2015). Teams collaborate to use collective competencies to resolve shared issues and challenges (Hardy et al., 2005):

When I talk about things with other people I get good ideas or like things become more clear to me so I find that really helpful. You can really get so much groundwork done working with other people’s [work] that they did before. [Interview—Employee]

Learning, the second behavioural component of employee resilience, supports innovation, and helps develop the competencies that are necessary in overcoming, and learning during challenges and crises (Kuntz et al., 2017; Walker et al., 2020). This ex-ante skill enables individuals to be resilient during routine challenges, build resilience capacity before severe crises and be adaptive in the midst of crises. Like network leveraging, this skill is particularly salient in the public sector, where under-resourcing and complex demands are common (Cameron, 1998; Christensen & Lægreid, 2011b). Goals that are learning-centred, rather than rigid and performance-oriented, foster wellbeing and growth as well as performance. They support deep and sustained learning that ultimately build capacities such as adaptive resilience (Winters & Latham, 1996).

The third key behavioural component of resilience is adaptability. It occurs when employees use their resources (both personal and job-related) to respond swiftly (ex-post) to changes and uncertainties. Adaptability helps individuals use experiences involving change or challenge in order to grow and develop personally and professionally (Kuntz et al., 2017). It also means that employees can effectively adapt to changing demands and stressors that arise and develop in a particular context. In doing so, they use learning to improve and modify their adaptive responses over time.

Table 6.1 exemplifies the behavioural components of employee resilience, with examples from interviews with public employees and managers.

Table 6.1 Resilient behaviours and examples
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These behaviours are all closely interwoven and reinforce each other. For instance, network leveraging supports adaptability, which in turn helps learning (Folke et al., 2010). A resilient employee with appropriate support would collaborate well with others, adapt accordingly and also contribute to individual and organizational learning. Resilient employees adapt to changing job circumstances, and acquire and use personal, work, and social resources well. In contrast, a person who lacks resilience-enabling support may find collaboration difficult; and not learn easily. They may also struggle with change.

Resilience is often thought of as an outcome (Zautra & Reich, 2011), but the capacity itself has strong and significant downstream consequences for employees and workplaces. Job satisfaction, wellbeing and engagement are three known outcomes of employee resilience (Malik & Garg, 2020; Näswall et al., 2019). A resilient workplace is defined as one that achieves ‘desirable outcomes amid adversity, strain, and significant barriers to adaptation or development’ (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003, p. 94). It is an essential capacity in modern organizations, constantly facing change and challenge.

Leadership for Resilience and Growth

Although resilience likely depends to some extent on relatively stable individual characteristics (Donnellan & Robins, 2010), it is also shaped by the environment and specifically, leadership (Franken, 2019; Nguyen et al., 2016). The next section discusses and relates our findings to recommendations for public organizations and their leaders, specifically on how managers can engage in growth-oriented leadership (Franken, 2019) to build resilience in their workforce. Such leadership is relational and reflects a willingness to attend to the development needs of employees. It reflects calls for leadership models which facilitate employees’ personal and vocational development (Zhang & Chen, 2013), rather than focusing on task and goal performance (Hargis et al., 2011; Howell & Avolio, 1993).

Resilience-enabling leadership is associated with the provision of resources. An employee with a resilience-enabling manager is provided with clear pathways for personal and professional growth, individualized feedback, trust and autonomy, as well as a functional norms for teamwork. These resources are likely to help develop resilient behaviours, maintain resilience capacity in the face of challenges, and further grow resilience as a result. This mirrors conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989), that when individuals gain resources, they protect and invest in them, and then become better placed to gain more resources (Demerouti et al., 2004; Ng & Feldman, 2012). In contrast, a resilience-harming manager may contribute to a reduction in resources. For example, poor or unclear feedback might mean that employees ‘are more likely to engage in feedback avoidance in order to avoid further resource losses from interacting with the abusive supervisor’ (Halbesleben et al., 2014, p. 1336). They may also be reluctant to show vulnerability, i.e. through problem solving or experimenting, in attempts to protect any remaining resources (Halbesleben, 2010). Resource provision, or loss, is relevant to the resilience development process, and needs to be considered when understanding how resilience can be both enabled and harmed by managers in organizations.

Resilience-enabling leadership is also capability, competence and confidence-enhancing. Such managers use their authority to develop adaptive, independent and autonomous employees, rather than relying on it to perpetuate traditional worker-manager dependencies and maintain command and control power structures (Heifetz, 1994; Wilson et al., 2017). The latter does not help employee growth and development and is increasingly ill-suited to today’s dynamic environments. Instead, a set of beliefs and behaviours by managers are needed to foster employee resilience in subordinates.

Our analysis resulted in four core dimensions of leadership behaviours that foster resilience: Seeing people as ‘developable’, not as broken or fixed, Supporting personal goals, Providing both challenging tasks and safe failures and Managing the whole team (Table 6.2).

Table 6.2 Leadership beliefs and behaviours that foster resilience
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Seeing People as ‘Developable’, Not as Broken or Fixed

If a manager views resilience as developable, they are more likely to try and foster it. However, we found that managers with a formal hierarchical approach to their role typically saw employee resilience (and general capability) in traditional terms: they saw it as fixed and trait-based, i.e. having natural self-confidence and a proactive personality. These managers, perhaps conveniently, could not see the pivotal role they could play in developing resilience.

It might be just that they have a degree of maturity, or that they will keep things in perspective or kind of, have their own personal ways of managing stuff. And other people can’t, some people are just total stress bunnies and react to everything that happens in a negative way. [Interview—Manager]

Although some managers saw resilience as a fixed trait, employees often saw their psychological state as dependent on how their managers treated them. They saw their resilience as both developable and damageable by managers. A quote about the impact of micromanagement illuminates this:

It takes away self-esteem because they don’t believe in your ability to do a job. Well when you feel like you’re constantly being checked up on and you’re not allowed to just go up and meet with people or do things without them being there, you know…You can’t learn in that respect. [Interview—Employee]

In a more positive light, managers’ behaviours could have healthy impacts on employees (such as through developing their resilience):

Oh it [my manager’s behaviour] makes me want to turn up. Just want to get stuck in which is what it’s about. [Interview—Employee]

Our interviews found that growth-oriented leadership reduced demands on employees and stress, and promoted employee commitment, confidence, job motivation and feelings of being valued. These psychological states in turn helped employees be resilient. Employees engaged in adaptive behaviours, sought development opportunities and elicited continuous learning processes.

…he’s [manager] always open to anything you want to suggest like if you bring a development opportunity and its relevant then you can be confident that you’ll be able to do it within reason… to even have that brought to me as an opportunities kind of made me feel quite good because I wouldn’t have thought I’d even be considered for this. [Interview—Employee]

Supporting Personal Goals

Growth-oriented managers supported employees’ subjective career successes, defined as the ‘person's own preferences for development in an occupation, that is his/her individual perception of career experience’ (Gattiker & Larwood, 1986, p. 80). Subjective success is important because objective success, such as promotion and pay increases, are sometimes limited in public sectors (Frank & Lewis, 2004; Lyons et al., 2006). A public manager who values employee growth and potential is subsequently developing committed and effective public servants (Ng et al., 2005). It likely also partly compensates for the low pay that characterizes some public sector jobs:

I’ve been told ‘I can offer you at least 10,000 more than what you’re on now’—it’s not a more complicated job … but the money isn’t enough to make me want to change. [Interview—Manager]

Growth-oriented leadership is relational. Consistent with other leadership constructs such as transformational, servant, organizing and paradoxical, resilience enhancing leaders respond to, care, and are seen to care, about those they are responsible for (Dong et al., 2017; Franken, 2019; Miao et al., 2014; Plimmer & Blumenfeld, 2012).

The best managers are people managers, they care about their staff, they put them into training, they develop them to become the best people they can. And then they know how to manage up. They’re the best managers. Quite often you’ll get managers that just manage up. So all they care about is looking good to the person above them and they don’t care about the people below them. [Interview—Employee]

Some research has found that these ‘developmental’ managers are not easy to come by in the public sector (Plimmer et al., 2017a), where layers of mixed ideologies such as new public management, market models and bureaucracies have led to strong management control, but weak management development and accountability. Our findings supported the idea that some managers are better at managing up than down, and are motivated to advance their own career but not that of their staff (Feldman & Weitz, 1991).

You’ve still got a lot of the same people in those leadership positions that have been there for 10 or 15 years and they got there through hanging around and being quite senior and knowledgeable about their jobs rather than being leaders per-se. So in that situation you don’t have people who necessarily have the right sort of set of skills to lead or manage people. [Interview—Manager]

Growth-oriented leadership is also about encouraging employees to make mistakes and then grow as a result. An employee explains this below:

If you let people make a few mistakes in a really low…you know, like there’s a…the potential negative is really quite minor, but you let them kind of fail, or also encourage them to deal with difficult situations that as a fresh new person, they’re pretty stressful, but they’re actually not, you know what I mean, in hindsight you go ‘yeah that wasn’t really that bad’. I think that helps you to then develop up and be able to deal with more and more difficult situations. [Interview—Employee]

Related to growth and development is learning (Hameed & Waheed, 2011), and managers can foster this through a learning orientation:

I say ‘so, what have you learnt from this?’ I’d say there’s always some learning. So ‘what DID you learn and what do you think you could do better next time?’ So you just went ahead and did it off the back of your hand? And just made a decision? Or did you go and check that perhaps you should have done this, you know? [Interview—Manager]

As can be expected, managers who do not foster growth in employees were found to have a negative impact on employee morale and motivation (Moynihan, 2009; Pandey, 2010) limiting the possibilities for resilience development:

[Having a manager who is not growth oriented] is like doing a degree that never ends and it’s like you can’t get to a certain level and then you know, you get promoted, or you know, you just keep going forever trying to get a degree. [Interview—Employee]

Managers may also lack the time (and prioritization skills) to work with employees to discuss and plan their growth and development opportunities:

I’m an investment advisor, so my next career step would be a senior investment advisor and for me in the last year I’ve struggled to understand what that progression looks like and I have asked a lot of questions about it but [my manager] doesn’t have the time to really sit down and explain that. [Interview—Employee]

Without growth-oriented managers, employees are left to navigate their opportunities. This is good for certain employees, mainly as it represents some capacity for resilience and self-management. However, not being supported in this way can place unnecessary stress and burden on employees:

And previously any kind of secondments or movements I’ve done I’ve made those myself, I’ve made those enquiries on my own, I haven’t had anyone or a manager come to me and say you know, this would be a good idea for you or anything like that. [Interview—Employee]

Providing Both Challenging Tasks and Safe Failures

A trusting relationship between employees and managers is important for resilience (Franken, 2019; Walker et al., 2020). With this trust comes the managers’ belief in employee competence, which enables autonomy and self-management. Such independence is an essential part of employee resilience (Näswall et al., 2019).

I guess that’s why I try to do, just assume that they are capable of doing their job and let them get on with it. Um, expect them to hold up their hand if they need help. And if need be, kind of get alongside them to help them with what they need. [Interview—Manager]

The quotes above and below establish that a balance of support is required for trust—a certain degree of autonomy with adequate help and guidance when required:

[My manager] has a lot of faith in me to manage myself to some extent. So he’s, in saying that, he’s very supportive and you know that if something happens and you need help, he’ll be there and he’ll do whatever needs to be done to make that happen. But yeah, doesn’t micromanage, which is appealing. [Interview—Employee]

Trust, belief in competence and allowance of autonomy are often interwoven with learning. A resilience-enabling manager balances growth (and learning), trust and collaboration in the approach to leadership:

So what I say is ‘you’re a manager in your own right’ When I see you’re not managing yourself or you can’t manage, that’s where I step in. So that gives them some autonomy to make decisions for themselves. They can be right or wrong, I don’t care. As long as there’s that learning if it comes back to me. [Interview—Manager]

The balance between providing support and allowing autonomy can also come down to the different stages of trust development between managers and employees (Whitener et al., 1998):

What happens is you grow a trust with the individual you’re working with and it might start off with direction but it ends up with suggestion. And that suggestion, once the trust is grown delivers what it was you want. Because you don’t need somebody telling you to do it your way, you just need to make sure that the aim is achieved and you can’t achieve the aim until you’ve built the trust. [Interview—Manager]

Trusting behaviours by managers are often reciprocated by employees, through a process of social exchange. There is a reciprocal trust that can emerge from the employee, whereby they feel that they trust their manager to value them and support them in their extra efforts. This is good for employee resilience (learning, development, extension of capabilities) and organizations:

[When] they’ve given me that respect…it’s my responsibility to make sure that I get my work done. [Interview—Employee]

Another employee experienced a sense of motivation to work and freedom when he feels trusted.

…I actually enjoy coming to work because you have the freedom to do stuff. [Interview—Employee]

Extra discretionary effort can also result from a trusting employee–manager relationship (Burke et al., 2007):

If there is a big drama, all hands to the pump, I’ll work extra or I’ll call into meetings from home and all that kind of stuff and I think that’s kind of a key to having a good, having a workforce that’s kind of prepared to go that extra mile when there is a big issue on. [Interview—Employee]

Positive leader–follower exchanges, underpinned by trust, matter in public contexts, and predict motivation among public sector employees (Gould-Williams & Davies, 2005). This is especially so when employees lack confidence in political leaders and ministers (Miao et al., 2014). Managers trusting their employees' capabilities and giving them autonomy likely provides employees confidence to address, experiment with and learn from the challenges of governance. Positive interactions with leaders promote trust in the leader–follower dynamic, even if trust is lacking elsewhere. This makes sense since ‘direct leaders (e.g. supervisors) appear to be a particularly important referent of trust’ (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002, p. 611). Trust-based experiences with a leader may also foster organizational commitment among public servants (Miao et al., 2014).

Both employees and (some) managers emphasized the importance of not micromanaging employees, but also providing support:

If they’re given a task and a time to be completed by, one follow up three-quarters of the way through saying, “How you going? Need any help?” And then wait for them to come back with it. Not be on their back every couple of hours saying, “How you going?” [It] can give people confidence that they are trusted. [I help them] out when they need [it] but don’t micromanage. [Interview—Manager]

Micromanagement was thus identified as harmful for employee resilience. This likely stems from the pressure on managers to achieve short term political deliverables at the expense of working proactively towards long-term goals (Pandey, 2010).

Micromanaging behaviour sometimes caused a lack of trust. When managers do not believe in the competence and growth potential of employees, they tend to control processes in ways that damage the dyadic relationship and resilience itself (Weibel & Six, 2013). While in some cases lack of belief in employee competence might be warranted (for example, with new employees), at times it seemed more a matter of managerial style than employee competence. This is harmful for resilience development.

It’s the micromanagement that is a disguise for performance management… And it’s just like setting impossible goals, saying OK, well there’s a problem with your performance. [Interview—Employee]

Excessive control or micromanagement led one employee to feel as though she was being treated like a child.

Micromanaging is therefore damaging and can turn the exchange process negative, thwarting individual autonomy and leaving employees unfulfilled and lacking ownership of their work (Hackman & Oldham, 1980). Social exchange can work in a negative and harmful way, whereby ‘employees will respond negatively to unfair treatment’ (Boddy, 2014, p. 116). In our research, we found that some employees who experienced micromanagement, for instance, would reciprocate with more counterproductive behaviours. One employee spoke on behalf of his team when he said:

We really didn’t want to do anything else, we didn’t want to do any more than our job. [Interview—Employee]

Another employee noted that:

[Micromanagement] can allow people to get a bit complacent. Because you think if no one is going to talk to me about this or if everything I’m doing is just going to be acceptable … you sort of get a bit complacent and think I’ll just keep doing it the way I’m doing it because no one’s telling me otherwise and you don’t learn to evolve or change. [Interview—Employee]

All in all, the ability to balance support with autonomy and lack of micromanagement characterize growth-oriented leaders, creating trusting, positive interactions between leaders and team members, enabling employee resilience. Importantly, employee-centric culture, including trusting relationships, has been suggested to be the foundation of an adaptive, resilient, organization, a base on which a culture of collaboration and learning can be built (Walker et al., 2020).

Managing the Whole Team

Managers who foster collaboration are important for resilience because they help to build behavioural norms for network leveraging and allow individuals to experience the benefits that come from sharing knowledge and learning from each other (Malik & Garg, 2020). When employees recognize and utilize others’ skills and resources they are better equipped to face challenges and perform resiliently. Managers can create a culture of collaboration in various ways, through fostering norms for collaboration, involving themselves in collaboration with the team and setting collective tasks for employees:

I always ask for a collaborative approach. And you know, bring them in as part of the situation. And work together on the result or an outcome, however we need to get there. [interview—Manager]

[My manager will] put me on a project and tell me the people who need to be brought in on that project and he’s also open to me bringing in more people if I think it’s suitable. [Interview—Employee]

Such a collaborative` approach helps employees build valuable networks between each other.

Leadership that encourages employees to work ‘with groups inside and outside of the organisation’ (Hsieh & Liou, 2016, p. 84) builds resilience, and meets the demands for effective public service operations inclusive of intra- and inter-agency collaboration and networked governance (Campbell, 2016; Silvia & McGuire, 2010; Stoker, 2006). Effective collaboration is not just a product of network leveraging ability. It also relates to increased learning, problem solving and adaptability in employees, all of which tie directly into employee resilience (Getha-Taylor, 2008; Kuntz et al., 2017; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011).

Some managers understand the importance of collaboration, and have the intention to promote it, but may struggle with executing it in reality. This may be a product of the layering of various reform models, where public servants and their managers must work within multiple, contradictory logics (Fossestøl et al., 2015):

You get mixed messages, like I say, do it at whatever cost, and then you did that and the cost was too high. So it’s the same with collaboration it’s like, you know, you all have to work together as a team, there’s too much talking. You know, you guys are wasting too much time because you’re working together, I’m gonna get you to work on stuff individually. But make sure you ask the senior people before you do anything, but don’t talk to each other. Um so I guess that’s the best way I can answer that is, you always think you’re doing the wrong thing, you spend the whole day worried that you’re gonna get told you did something wrong. [Interview—Employee]

The impact of this can be that employees learn to accept that not speaking up, or withholding ideas from each other, is actually safer than showing vulnerabilities through experimenting and sharing ideas with others:

I’ve probably switched off and I think that’s fair to say with a lot of public servants who have been there for 10 years, you get taught that doing nothing and wasting time and keeping your head down and keeping out of the way, is better than actually working with anyone. [Interview—Employee]

Concluding Remarks

This chapter extends conceptual and empirical understandings of resilience in public sector workplaces, with specific regard to the nature of employee resilience and how managers can facilitate it. Four key takeaways are: resilient responses are core to continual adaptation and flourishing at work; employee resilience is developable; resilience enabling leadership focuses on supporting growth and development and micromanaging behaviours can be harmful to employee resilience.

The public sector context increasingly requires resilient employees, organizations and institutions. This is exemplified by the collaboration and learning required for addressing ‘wicked problems’ (Stoker, 2006), and the adaptiveness demanded by uncertain environments (Karp & Helg, 2008). This research shows more specifically how factors in the public sector context can influence resilience. Employee-level resilience possibly works at organizational levels too, as the behaviours likely help the integration of both exploration and exploitation (March, 1991). Learning, network leveraging and adaptability have clear correspondences to exploration, but also probably provide a foundation for efficiency and use of existing resources too. Other research has found that aggregated individual-level employee experiences help integrate exploitation and exploration (Plimmer et al., 2017a). Reciprocally, environments that integrate exploration and exploitation likely support employee resilience.

We expect employee resilience may also help public organizations in their ongoing struggle to live up to the values the public hold them to. Organizations vary in the degree to which they are public, but most are public in some way. Participants in this study worked for organizations that were high in publicness, and so characterized by complex tasks, professional orientation, diverse stakeholders, ‘conflicting environmental demands, and low managerial autonomy’ (Antonsen & Jørgensen, 1997, p. 1467). Employee resilience, and accompanying supportive management behaviours, are likely needed to deal with this context, but the same context may not always encourage these right behaviours. For instance, low managerial autonomy likely limits the scope of support that can be offered. Complex tasks, diverse stakeholders and conflicting demands would make micromanagement tempting as a way to ‘get things right’.

Despite these pressures both managers and employees in public organizations are expected to demonstrate ‘public values’, which concern the values (and expectations) attached to public organizations and delivery of public services particularly those value sets concerning intra-organizational life. Such relevant and identified public values include robustness (which includes adaptability, reliability etc.), innovation (which includes enthusiasm, risk readiness, etc.), productivity (which includes effectiveness, business-like approach, etc.) and self-development of employees (which includes good working environment) (Jørgensen & Bozeman, 2007). Employee resilience matches several of these public values. Adaptability likely supports robustness; network leveraging and learning would support self-development of employees and learning would enable innovation.

Employee resilience may also support the accountability of public sector employees (another set of public values that include professionalism and integrity). Its capability development would encourage professionalism, and the associated self- and other-awareness would work to enhance integrity.

Resilient behaviours—network-leveraging, learning and adaptability—help employees deal with complex public sector realities. Such behaviours are pertinent at the individual and team level, but they also model effective behaviours at higher levels in the public system. Implications for organizations are to develop, select, support and hold accountable managers capable of enabling growth and resilience in their teams.

When addressing the potential solutions for coping with the future of work, leadership matters. Resilient employees are well equipped to confront the increasingly uncertain and dynamic nature of workplaces, but they need to be supported and developed. The managerial behaviours identified here represent useful competencies for growth-oriented leaders. Additionally, this will require a view of the workplace as a learning environment, supportive of adaptability and those who facilitate it. Such an orientation may require not only investment in managerial and employee development opportunities, but also review of reward and signaling practices in organizations which may discount resilience-enabling behaviours and/or prioritize behaviours inimical to resilience.

For organizations, our findings provide an alternative to the top down command and control management that sometimes characterize government organizations (Plimmer et al., 2017a). Executive actions can facilitate line leadership behaviours that develop employee resilience, and build over time organizational capability to better deal with ambiguity, tension and the competing demand of public service life (Jørgensen & Bozeman, 2007). The resilience conceptualized in this paper was at the employee level, but we expect it would aggregate to organizational levels. It would be hard to imagine an organization as resilient if its employees were not. However, this is an empirical question for future research.

We hope the ideas in this chapter will inform more positive and adaptive behavioural norms at individual, group and organizational levels, contributing to the resilience of the wider public sector system.