Linking Employee Resilience with Organizational Resilience: The Roles of Coping Mechanism and Managerial Resilience

BACKGROUND: Environmental uncertainty has become the normal surviving and development environment for organizations. Resilience is the key to manage the crisis and abrupt crush, and the relationship between employee resilience and organizational resilience still needs to be explored in Chinese context. The study is to uncover the black box between employee resilience and organizational resilience. METHODS: Based on the conservation of resource theory, this study introduced managerial resilience, problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping into the relational mechanism between employee resilience and organizational resilience. The study adopted structural equations, bootstrapping methods, and analyzed 329 multi-point employee–manager matching data as the research basis from high-tech industries, service industries, and traditional manufacturing industries. RESULTS: This study demonstrated that employee resilience is positively associated with organizational resilience; The indirect effects of employee resilience on organizational resilience through problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping were statistically significant; moreover, managerial resilience positively moderated the relation between employee resilience and emotion-focused coping, and it also moderated the indirect effect of employee resilience on organizational resilience through emotion-focused coping. CONCLUSION: This study adds value to the literature by revealing employee resilience boots problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping, resulting in more or less organizational resilience in the context of Chinese enterprises. It is suggested that in the daily management of the organization, we should pay more attention to cultivate and develop employee resilience to improve organizational resilience.