Individual Resilience in the Organization in the Face of Crisis: Study of the Concept in the Context of COVID-19

In the context of a health crisis of unprecedented magnitude that we have experienced such as COVID-19 we join the efforts of practitioners and researchers to answer the question: ‘What is the organizational context that promotes individual adaptation in a context of adversity?’. Specifically, our research aims to explore organizational practices that promote individual resilience in a COVID-19 crisis situation and in a Tunisian context. Therefore, we believe that the paradigm (resilience in the face of the COVID-19 crisis) and the context (Tunisian) both constitute the originality of our article. Our research contribution consists in demonstrating that the company has a managerial need to strengthen the psychological protective factors of its employees, which will promote their individual resilience in the organization. This necessarily leads it to develop the individual’s defense mechanisms against trauma, psychological reconstruction and post-resilience learning. This modeling of resilience allowed us to observe and recognize it in sixteen Tunisian companies by using a qualitative study based on sixteen semi-structured interviews analyzed by the ‘Nvivo 12’ software in order to explore the functioning of individual resilience in a real organizational context.