Investigating the role of supervisor support in enhancing workplace resilience training outcomes

Increasing organisational interest in supporting employees’ psychological functioning amidst work stressors has led to the propagation of workplace resilience training programs (Scheuch et al., 2021). Research has focused on determining whether workplace resilience training can promote employee resilience (Vanhove et al., 2016), and has currently concluded that the effect of workplace resilience training on desired outcomes is modest, dissipates over time, and can be inconsistent over trials of the same program. However, the influence of training relevant work features, such as the supervisor, on resilience training outcomes has not been examined and may have the potential to enhance resilience training effectiveness. Therefore, there is an opportunity to investigate how the supervisor can be engaged in workplace resilience training to optimise workplace resilience training outcomes and improve employee resilience. 

My doctoral research explores the role of the supervisor in influencing resilience training outcomes in a series of studies. First, I report the design and implementation of a supervisor-led extension to Self-Reflection Resilience Training (Crane, Boga, et al., 2019) with officer cadets (n = 168) and their instructors, undergoing a period of military training at the Royal Military College, Australia (Paper 1). The supervisor-led extension was then evaluated in a randomised controlled trial by platoon that compared the trajectories of psychological functioning of cadets who received the resilience training program alone to cadets who received the resilience training program and the supervisor-led extension (Paper 2). Findings indicated that supervisors can be engaged to support resilience training and that the addition of the supervisor-led extension could provide added benefit to the original resilience training program alone. In exploring how the supervisor-led extension supported cadet resilience, tests of mechanisms of the extension’s effect indicated that the supervisor-led extension produced its added benefit by enhancing perceptions of supervisor support for the individual (i.e., cadets’ perceptions that their instructors cared for their welfare). To further explore the mechanisms by which supervisor support for resilience training may enhance resilience training outcomes, I conducted a retrospective cross-sectional survey study with a sample of openly recruited (n = 145) and panel recruited (n = 400) participants who had completed workplace resilience training in the past five years (Paper 3). Findings indicated that, although supervisor support for resilience training could enhance desired outcomes via promoting training transfer (i.e., the application of training skills at work), increased perceptions of supervisor support for the individual appeared to be the most consistent mechanism of effect, across samples and outcomes. 

This research makes a contribution to informing best practice for practitioners and researchers of workplace resilience training. It highlights the opportunity for practitioners to engage supervisors in workplace resilience training to enhance desired outcomes by uplifting perceptions of supervisory support. It also emphasizes the need for research to account for the influence of training relevant work features when evaluating workplace resilience training. Accumulatively, this research deepens our understanding of how employee resilience can be achieved within a workplace context.