Zicklin Professor Publishes Research on Resilience

C. Justice Tillman

Most people would agree that resilience—the ability to bounce back from adversity—is an advantage in pretty much every area of life. C. Justice Tillman of the Zicklin School wanted to learn more about this quality, and as an assistant professor of management, he was especially interested in how it helps people at their jobs. 

As outlined in a recent article in the Journal of Social Psychology, Tillman and his colleagues examined whether resilient employees can overcome the negative effects of increased workloads (termed “role overload” in the paper). “This study is especially important as individuals are dealing with the coronavirus disease,” Tillman notes. “People are facing huge burdens.” 

Resilient employees, the study found, benefit from a phenomenon known as “family-work enrichment,” by which positive involvement in one’s family, or personal, life, makes one better able to perform at work. While often emotional, these benefits can also be concrete—as, for example, when working parents learn to better manage their time in the office because of childcare responsibilities.

Resilient employees were also found to be less likely to engage in “surface acting,” or displaying emotions they don’t really feel. “Even when faced with additional work pressures, resilient people will often find themselves happier with work, less likely to have to fake being happy at work, and less likely to experience burnout from the pressures,” Tillman concludes. 

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