Why resilience is bad

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New York: McGraw-Hill. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. All authors contributed to the study conception and design; data collection and analysis were performed by both authors. The first draft of the manuscript was written by first author and both authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Correspondence to Hamideh Mahdiani. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Reprints and Permissions. Mahdiani, H. The Dark Side of Resilience. Download citation. Accepted : 20 January Published : 03 February Issue Date : September Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:.

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search SpringerLink Search. Download PDF. Abstract Is resilience always adaptive and functional, or can resilience be maladaptive in contexts where it masks vulnerability or prevents effective action to address risk? Resilience as a Changing Concept The concept of resilience is becoming increasingly multisystemic as studies of positive human adaptation under stress are inspiring research into fields as diverse as resilient communication systems Anderson et al.

Resilience on a Spectrum: Functional vs. Is There a Wrong Degree of Resilience? Is There a Wrong Context for Resilience? Is There a Wrong Usage for Resilience? Concluding Remarks Humans have always wanted to be strong. Data Availability Not applicable.

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Article Google Scholar Kaplan, H. Google Scholar Kaplan, H. Chapter Google Scholar Kaplan, H. To read my take on how to build resilience, go here: 4 ways leaders can build resilience. A friend of mine told me about a situation she had seen at a processing plant. Some workers at the plant needed to access a conveyor belt to inspect part of the production line. The only problem was, this conveyor was above ground level.

There was no stable platform or ladder to climb up there. Instead of raising this as an issue, the team adapted. They began stacking boxes on top of each other, until they had created a makeshift platform. This meant they were able to climb up and inspect the conveyor. However, this was all incredibly risky. The platform was not stable and could have resulted in a severe accident. Reading this, you may think that it is a ridiculous situation.

The fact remains — these workers adapted to the situation and overcame the challenge. They were being resilient, right? However, these team members, while being resilient, are more likely to put up with the bad conditions that you throw at them.

Being resilient does not mean putting up with continuous poor working conditions, bad leadership and a toxic workplace culture. Being resilient means adapting to reasonable change and handling reasonable stress.

What is considered reasonable will be different for every individual. Nobody can tell you to be more resilient. I understand that leaders will always encounter challenges.

When you overcome one, another will appear. In short, when resilience is driven by self-enhancement, success comes at a high price: denial. Along with blinding leaders to improvement opportunities and detaching them from reality, leadership pipelines are corroded with resilient leaders who were nominated as high-potentials but have no genuine talent for leadership. To explain this phenomenon, sociobiologists David Sloan Wilson and E. As Robert Hogan notes, to get ahead of other groups, individuals must be able to get along with each other within their own group in order to form a team.

This always requires leadership, but the right leaders must be chosen. When it comes to deciding which leaders are going to rally the troops in the long-term, the most psychologically resilient individuals have a miscellany of characteristics that come much closer to political savvy and an authoritarian leadership style than those needed to influence a team to work in harmony and focus its attention on outperforming rivals.

In other words, choosing resilient leaders is not enough: they must also have integrity and care more about the welfare of their teams than their own personal success. In sum, there is no doubt that resilience is a useful and highly adaptive trait, especially in the face of traumatic events.

However, when taken too far, it may focus individuals on impossible goals and make them unnecessarily tolerant of unpleasant or counterproductive circumstances. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. Stress management.