The Development and Validation of the Employee Resilience Scale (EmpRes): The Conceptualisation of a New Model

The need for an employee-specific measure of resilience has directed the development of the Employee Resilience Scale (EmpRes). The conceptualisation of employee resilience in the present study describes an employee capacity that organisations can help develop through the provision of enabling factors. The EmpRes Scale was developed and tested in three samples, and was found to have adequate measurement properties. Findings from two organisational samples also revealed that employee resilience is significantly associated with learning culture, empowering leadership, job engagement, job satisfaction and intentions to turnover, and unrelated to employee participation and corporate communication. The research indicated that employee resilience has a mediating effect on the relationships between learning culture and job engagement and job satisfaction, and empowering leadership and job engagement, job satisfaction and intentions to turnover. The findings suggest that organisations enable their employees to be more resilient by creating a learning oriented culture and building empowering leadership, which in turn leads to better organisational outcomes. Although future research is required, the present study shows preliminary support for the psychometric properties of the scale as well as the conceptual model