Pedagogies for resilience in business schools: Exploring strategies and tactics

Abstract

The capacity to bounce back after challenge or disruption and positive adapt to new circumstances has recently become more pronounced because of market volatilities, technological advances at work, as well as the ubiquitous and relentless use of social media (UNESCO 2017; Stokes et al 2018). Indeed, such changes have highlighted the strategic importance – and concern for the lack of – the resilience capacities of business school graduates at all levels (Robertson et al 2015; King et al 2015). Within this context, evidence indicates how the capacities for managerial resilience can be developed through various pedagogical aspects including strategies and tactics for promoting personal flexibility, purposefulness, self-confidence, and social networks (Cooper et al 2013). However, such capacities are curbed and contained by wider forces such as the broader organisational structure and culture of the business school itself and of the graduate employer, both of which limit potential flexibility (Akrivou & Bradbury-Huang, 2015; Robertson et al, 2015; Cregan et al 2019). To add further complexity, recent research has also highlighted the contextualised nature of resilience, whereby its meaning and manifestation vary across occupational settings (Kossek & Perrigino, 2016). Within this context, therefore, a critical challenge for contemporary business school education is to develop pedagogical interventions which might generate resources for resilience which are not only relevant to be able to express and mobilise resilience in a diverse range of occupational settings, but which are also sensitive to wider influences which shape resilience (e.g. employer organisational structures). Such a challenge needs to reflect the deeply pragmatic question of how to develop or integrate a pedagogical response in a context whereby (1) that response is culturally located in a business school organisational structure and culture which might limit capacity development, and (2) the curricula may already be heavily prescribed due to accreditation requirements or is already multi-layered from other agendas such as employability, responsibility, or sustainability (Wall et al, 2017; Cregan et al, 2019). Therefore this QIC aims to explore the strategies and tactics of how to inculcate the resilience capacities of business school learners where the expression of that capacity itself may manifest differently across occupational settings and which is organisationally bound in its development. References Akrivou, K., & Bradbury-Huang, H. (2015). Educating integrated catalysts: Transforming business schools toward ethics and sustainability. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 14(2), 222-240. Cooper, C. L., Flint-Taylor, J., and Pearn, M. (2013). Building resilience for success: A resource for managers and organizations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cregan, K., Rowe, L., & Wall, T. (2019 forthcoming) Resilience education and training, in Leal Filho, W. (ed) Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals – Good Health & Wellbeing. Springer, Cham. King, D. D., Newman, A., & Luthans, F. (2015). Not if, but when we need resilience in the workplace: Workplace resilience. Journal of Organizational Behavior, n/a. Kossek, E. E., and Perrigino, M. B. (2016). Resilience: A review using a grounded integrated occupational approach. The Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 729-797. Robertson, I. T., Cooper, C. L., Sarkar, M., and Curran, T. (2015). Resilience training in the workplace from 2003 to 2014: A systematic review. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 88(3), 533–562. Stokes, P., Smith, S., Wall, T., Moore, N., Rowland, C., Ward, T., & Cronshaw, S. (2018). Resilience and the (micro-)dynamics of organizational ambidexterity: Implications for strategic HRM. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 1-36. UNESCO (2017). Six ways to ensure higher education leaves no one behind, Policy Paper 30. Available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002478/247862E.pdf (Accessed 20th Nov, 2018). Wall, T., Russell, J., Moore, N. (2017) Positive emotion in workplace impact: the case of a work-based learning project utilising appreciative inquiry. Journal of Work-Applied Management, 9 (2): 129-146.