Employee resilience and leadership styles: The moderating role of proactive personality and optimism

Resilience has merited growing interest in psychology and management research, given its potential to drive important organisational outcomes. Yet, there is limited understanding of the individual and contextual factors that promote resilient behaviours in organisations. This study explored relationships between dispositional variables (proactive personality and optimism), leadership styles (empowering and contingent reward leadership) and employee resilience. Data were collected from a sample of 269 while-collar workers in New Zealand through an online survey. Results show that empowering leadership, proactive personality and optimism were significantly related to resilient behaviours. Moreover, optimism interacted with contingent reward leadership to predict employee resilience. The findings underscore the importance of measuring employee resilience as a contextualised, behavioural capability, and the need to investigate its nomological network considering the interplay of organisational enablers and dispositional variables.