Individual resilience in a global crisis: An investigation of the service sector in Egypt during Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This study sets out to explore the critical factors that facilitate or hinder the development of individual resilience in Egyptian organisations. It attempts to address the lack of empirical data regarding the elements that foster individual resilience in the workplace and challenges the limited perspective that acknowledges only personality traits as antecedents to individual resilience. Despite the progress in resilience literature, the research is significantly limited and requires further exploration of the mechanisms that nurture individual resilience. To respond to this limitation, this investigation addresses individual resilience as a process continuously affected by the surrounding internal and external environment. This research investigates the impact of perceived support (internal environment) represented by organisations, supervisors, and co-workers, psychological safety (internal environment), and fear of COVID-19 (external environment) on individual resilience. In addition, the research investigates the moderating and mediating impact of psychological safety, and fear of COVID-19 on the relationship between perceived support and individual resilience to assess boundary conditions, facilitating or hindering factors and understand how resilience can develop as a function of the context they operate. The governing cultural context of this research is Egypt, an emerging economy in North Africa that has been largely neglected in terms of workplace resilience research, with the study participants recruited from the Egyptian services sector. This research adopted quantitative methodology using online surveys to assess the research variables. The results of this research suggest that individual resilience develops as a result of the mutual exchange of benefits between employees and different organisational stakeholders, confirming the social exchange theoretical view rooted back in motivational theories as a key contributor to the development of individual resilience. The results also indicate significant contributions from the surrounding environment and highlights important demographic, cultural and societal implications to the development of resilience. This confirms that viewing resilience as solely a product of individual traits in contemporary literature is a naïve view. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in depth.