Measuring resilience in health care provider organizations

Health care providers offer an ideal setting to study the effectiveness of resilient behavior. The notion of a resilient organization is an emerging concept for understanding and coping with the modern-day pace of change and associated work stress. Resilience is the ability of an individual or organization to expeditiously design and implement positive adaptive behaviors matched to the immediate situation, while enduring minimal stress. This paper reports on the development and testing of several scales designed to measure aspects of resilience in the health care provider industry. Six factors explaining over half the instrument variance were found, including: goal-directed solution seeking; avoidance; critical understanding; role dependence; source reliance; and resource access. Results are discussed and future research is outlined.