The focal article written by Bergman and Jean (2016) draws attention to a critical void in the industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology domain: the study of low- and medium-skill workers. Although segmenting employees based on their job status may provide new conceptualizations of employee work experiences, this approach may not provide the nuanced view necessary to fully comprehend the many ways in which employees differentially experience the workplace. Within this category of workers, experiences may vary based on employees’ race, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), or other identity-defining characteristics, and these person-specific identities may interact with one another. An intersectional research approach provides a foundation on which researchers can more fully understand how individuals’ multiple social identities interact to affect their workplace experiences. In the commentary that follows, we provide an overview of intersectional research and describe how such a perspective would lead to meaningful developments within I-O psychology.

Bergman and Jean (2016) compare published industrial and organizational (I-O) literature with labor statistics, demonstrating an underrepresentation of “workers” (i.e., “wage earners, laborers, first-line personnel, freelancers, contract workers”) relative to managerial, professional, and executive positions. They note that one of four ways in which worker underrepresentation undermines the utility of I-O psychology research is that we could miss the role of worker status as a main effect on important variables and/or a moderator of key relationships, which could hinder understanding of important phenomena as they relate to workers. We applaud the emphasis on workers and agree with this basic premise.

Organizations are becoming increasingly likely to incorporate measures of trait resilience into their selection batteries despite the challenges and validity questions described by Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016). Organizations can overcome some of the challenges of selecting high resilience workers by improving attraction and recruitment methods. In the following commentary, we describe common organization efforts to attract high resilience workers for occupations with risk of psychological trauma. We integrate research on organizational attraction and trait resilience to predict which of these approaches are likely to have the desired (attract high resilient workers) or undesired (attract low resilient workers) effect.

In Industrial and Organizational Psychology volume 8, issue 3, a commentary to the focal article Ree et al. was unfortunately omitted. This commentary, “I've Found It, but What Does It Mean? On the Importance of Theory in Identifying Dominant General Factors,” by Zhenyu Yuan, is reproduced in the following pages.

We appreciate the authors of the target article (Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016) shining a spotlight on the important work being done in the study of resilience and providing a historical overview of how resilience has been conceptualized and assessed in the past. To add to this review, we would briefly like to comment on current developments in the field of resilience and related fields that may have broader implications for both the study of resilience and for many other topics in the industrial–organizational literature as well.

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) present an argument for consolidation and conceptual unification of the resilience research. As one of the few industrial–organizational (I-O) psychologists who regularly work in the sport psychology field, I was compelled to note the omission by Britt et al. of any reference to the resilience research in the sport psychology domain. As an I-O psychologist practicing sport psychology, I have stood on the shoulders of giants in applying with athletes and coaches our I-O theory and knowledge in areas such as motivation (e.g., Locke & Latham, 2002), training (e.g., skill acquisition, automaticity, deliberate practice, expertise, adaptive expertise, error based learning; e.g., Chen, Thomas, & Wallace, 2005; Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993; Ericsson, & Lehmann, 1996; Logan, 1988; Lorenzet, Salas, & Tannenbaum, 2005), leadership, and group and team dynamics (e.g., Colquitt, Noe, & Jackson, 2002; Salas, Cooke, & Rosen, 2008). I-O psychology tends to be on the vanguard in these areas, whereas sport psychology lags somewhat behind (compare Locke & Latham, 2002, with Gould, 1993, and Weinberg & Weigand, 1993; compare Vroom & Yetton, 1973, with Chelladurai & Haggerty, 1978). However, resilience has been a central research focus for sport psychologists for some time; it is a relatively recent area of interest for I-O psychologists. Interestingly, Britt et al. did not include even a single reference from the sport psychology literature. I strongly encourage I-O psychologists studying resilience to review, borrow, and build on the sport psychology research in this area.

In their focal article, Ree, Carretta, and Teachout (2015) based their definition of a dominant general factor (DGF) on two criteria: (a) A DGF should be the largest source of reliable variance; (b) it is influencing every variable measuring the construct. Although detailed attention has been paid to the statistical properties of a DGF, I believe another criterion of equal if not greater importance is the theoretical justification to expect a DGF in the measurement of a construct. In the following commentary, I will highlight the importance of theory as another important criterion when determining the meaningfulness and usefulness of DGFs, discuss the risks of creating a DGF without any theoretical guidance, and elaborate on the complexities surrounding job performance as a detailed example to illustrate why theory is important before extracting a DGF from performance ratings.

Resilience research has primarily focused on occupations that undergo a significant amount of stress, such as the military or trauma teams. In response, Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) call for “future work on resilience to expand to include a wider cross section of workers and occupations” (p. 397). We suggest that viewing resilience through a personality strength lens will facilitate this expansion. Adopting a personality strength approach to resilience will more clearly (a) link the capacity for resilience to positive adaptation in the face of a broader range of stressors beyond objectively significant adversity and (b) open up new methods of investigating the demonstration of resilience.

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) draw attention to issues in the psychological literature regarding how we define, assess, select for, and build employee resilience. We offer a handful of recommendations for complementing and expanding on these important issues. Specifically, we propose that research should include more common forms of workplace adversity, versus extreme and rare types of adversity; resilience should be assessed via objective multirater methodology rather than subjective self-report; because context is important when studying resilience, researchers should delineate the purposes of the research; resilience should be treated as a malleable rather than a fixed characteristic; and finally, the field would benefit from qualitative research in addition to quantitative research.

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) offer compelling arguments for the need to consider resilience trajectories and to identify the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and contextual factors accountable for unique trajectories. We welcome the call for more focused research efforts toward uncovering the role of resilience in organizations and concur with Britt et al. that there is a need for a clearer characterization of resilience among employees, the correlates of resilience, and the way that resilience can be facilitated. Our objective here is to build on the main thrust of Britt et al.’s focal article by outlining a novel perspective on employee resilience, which we believe will constitute an important contribution to the organizational resilience literature.

Resilience has become a popular buzzword in society today, both inside and outside academia. If you look at the mission statement of most companies nowadays, you are likely to come across some form of the term resilience. The United States Army has adopted The Ready and Resilient Campaign, which seeks to build and maintain resilience across all forces and integrate resilience into the culture of the U.S. Army so that improvements can be made in soldier resilience and unit readiness.

In the focal article, Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) are rightfully concerned that the topic of resilience may become a “quicksand” term that is used by different audiences in different manners. However, we are more optimistic than the authors of the focal article, as several researchers at the team level of analysis have outlined frameworks that have attempted to tease apart team resilience from related constructs such as adaptation. Likewise, such work has also provided a deeper understanding of the factors that serve as antecedents to team resilience and adaptation, as well as how both constructs can shape subsequent team outcomes. Accordingly, the “sand” is starting to congeal at the team level of analysis, and we bring in these insights to extend the conversation about resilience.

In the words of Winston Churchill, “When you're going through hell, keep going.” Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) note several traits (e.g., individual resources), environmental factors (e.g., unit, family, and community resources), and processes (e.g., seeking help from others) that help individuals to “keep going” in the face of adversity. I would argue that the third category, which I would suggest be expanded to practices, is the most important going forward. Unfortunately, psychologists often tend to focus the most effort on the first two: traits and environmental factors, which often leave individuals feeling helpless because both are largely outside of their control. In the face of adversity, people instead want to know, “What can I do to keep going?” This is not to say that traits or environmental factors are not important. They are. However, the most powerful work in resilience will promote personal agency (Bandura, 2001) and confidence in one's ability to develop resilience (e.g., a growth mindset; Dweck, 2006).

We share Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger's (2016) concern over the confusion of the conceptual definition of resilience and believe that this thorny issue should be solved. Hence, our objective in this commentary is to dispel to some extent the fuzzy state of the resilience construct content, building on the extant resilience literature. This will help to enhance resilience construct validity.

We read the focal article by Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) with special interest. About 10 years ago, we were asked to write a chapter on hardiness (Beehr & Bowling, 2005), and in doing so we had many observations about hardiness that were similar to Britt et al.’s observations about resilience. Our chapter was most closely aligned with the “capacity” concept of resilience, but we think that both the “capacity” approach and the “demonstration” approach to resilience have merit.

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) provide a summary of the conceptual confusion surrounding the construct of resilience as well as several key recommendations for spurring future organizational research on resilience. However, we feel that two key points were not adequately addressed in the focal article. First, we argue that we cannot fully understand the concept of resilience or apply it in our field of organizational studies without first understanding its fundamental theoretical groundings. Many of these underlying theoretical foundations on resilience were founded in and advanced through 50+ years of theory and research on family resilience literature; however, many of these perspectives were not addressed in the focal article. In this commentary, we outline and provide contextualized examples of how to apply one of the most widely used and empirically supported theoretical models of resilience—the ABC-X model (Hill, 1958)—to the work domain. Using the ABC-X model as a starting framework, we then highlight several additional theoretical perspectives that can inform research on employee resilience: Masten's (2001) ordinary magic, Antonovsky's (1979) sense of coherence, and Walsh's (2003) focus on strengths.

The term resilience has grown in popularity among the general public and within the scientific community. Unfortunately, the rise in popularity has advanced neither our theoretical understanding of this construct nor the methodological approaches to study this topic. Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) highlighted important conceptual, methodological, and practical advances and shortcomings within the literature on employee resilience. However, critical conceptual issues remain unaddressed within the focal article. Specifically, in our commentary, we differentiate between resiliency and resilience, identify key dimensions of each construct, and explicate the role of adversity and context to further advance our theoretical understanding of this construct. We conclude by discussing the implications of our proposed conceptualization and refinement of resilience for theory, research, and practice.

Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger (2016) discuss employee resilience trajectories, noting that only a few studies taking this approach have been conducted in the workplace. They recommend that with such an approach it is essential to assess baseline functioning, document adversity, and gather longitudinal data. They also point out the need to clarify what variables should be measured in the demonstration of resilience and suggest that resilience trajectories across different outcomes may or may not converge. We agree that trajectories are a promising approach to studying employee resilience. However, conceptualizing trajectories as profiles provides additional meaningful concepts for describing the demonstration of resilience. These concepts have the potential for moving theory and research beyond the work on trajectories described by Britt et al.