The Limits of Resilience

Resilience has become one of the defining virtues of contemporary professional life. It regularly appears as a quality sought in employees and leaders. To be resilient is understood as the ability to endure challenges, adapt to change, and recover quickly from organisational disruption. It is presented simultaneously as psychological strength and personal virtue.

The term, however, has a more complex history than its current usage suggests. In psychological research, resilience was initially understood as an individual capacity to cope effectively with adversity. While early resilience research often emphasised protective traits within individuals, subsequent scholarship has framed resilience as a dynamic process embedded within developmental and social systems. Ann Masten’s Ordinary Magic argues that resilience arises from ordinary adaptive systems such as secure relationships, effective schools, and community supports, rather than from rare or heroic personal qualities (Masten, 2001; 2014). Michael Ungar further develops a social-ecological account, describing resilience as the capacity of individuals to navigate toward health-sustaining resources and the capacity of families, communities, and institutions to provide those resources in culturally meaningful ways (Ungar, 2011; 2013). In this formulation, resilience depends not only on individual strength, but on the presence of conditions that make adaptation possible.

Notwithstanding this development in the literature, resilience within organisations is often framed as a personal responsibility. Employees are encouraged to develop coping strategies, build emotional strength, and enhance their adaptability. Such qualities may be valuable. Framed in this way, however, resilience can subtly relocate responsibility. The question becomes whether individuals are sufficiently robust, rather than whether the environment itself is sustainable.

Critical social theorists have described comparable shifts in responsibility from institutions to individuals. Nikolas Rose argues that advanced liberal governance increasingly obliges individuals to adapt, optimise, and self-regulate in response to systemic pressures (Rose, 1999). Wendy Brown similarly observes that neoliberal rationality casts individuals as responsible for navigating conditions not of their own making (Brown, 2015). Under such conditions, structural strain risks being reframed as a matter of personal resilience. The language of resilience may therefore function less as support and more as a technology of responsibilisation. The difficulty is not that resilience is undesirable; it is that resilience is positioned as an individual obligation irrespective of structural context.

Resilience concerns the ability to endure strain. The more fundamental question is whether the strain is justified. An individual may demonstrate considerable resilience while remaining embedded in conditions that undermine professional integrity or personal values. In such contexts, endurance may preserve institutional function, but at a cost to those required to sustain it.

The concept of moral injury, first developed in military psychology, has been extended to professions such as healthcare and education to describe the distress that arises when individuals are repeatedly required to act in ways that transgress deeply held moral commitments (Dean, Talbot & Dean, 2019). The resulting distress is not merely emotional fatigue; it is ethical dissonance. Encouraging resilience in such circumstances may prolong exposure to misalignment rather than address its source.

The language of resilience therefore warrants careful scrutiny. When organisations celebrate resilience without examining the conditions that necessitate it, adaptation risks becoming normalised compliance. Limits are interpreted as personal weakness rather than as indicators of systemic dysfunction. The issue is not whether resilience is valuable. It is whether resilience has become a substitute for structural reform.

A sustainable professional life requires more than endurance. It requires coherence between values, effort, and institutional realities. Where such coherence is absent, calls for greater resilience may exacerbate the very strains they are intended to alleviate.

If this discussion resonates, it may be worth examining these questions more carefully in conversation. The aim is not to reject resilience outright, but to consider whether what is being preserved is human flourishing or organisational continuity.

References

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.

Dean, W., Talbot, S., & Dean, A. (2019). “Reframing clinician distress: Moral injury not burnout.” Federal Practitioner, 36(9), 400–402

Masten, A. S. (2001). “Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development.” American Psychologist, 56(3), 227–238.

Masten, A. S. (2014). Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development, Guilford Press.

Rose, N. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ungar, M. (2011). The Social Ecology of Resilience: A Handbook of Theory and Practice, London: Springer.

Ungar, M. (2013). “Resilience, trauma, context, and culture,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 14(3), 255–266.