Resilience: distinct construct or conglomerate of existing traits?

Resilience: distinct construct or conglomerate of existing traits?

Since its inception in mainstream scientific psychology, resilience has emerged as a popular, yet controversial, construct. As evidenced in the target article, this controversy can be attributed, at least in part, to current conceptual and methodological difficulties hampering understanding of the construct. Chief among these concerns is the discriminant validity of resilience with respect to conceptually similar individual differences constructs, such as hardiness, mental toughness, adaptability, and even the five-factor personality dimensions. Advances in research on resilience, and ultimately the utility of the construct in applied settings, hinge on its distinction from related concepts. In this commentary, we extend Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, and Klieger’s (2016) brief discussion of dimensional redundancy, maintaining that the demonstration of discriminant validity is a necessary first step toward the conceptual clarification of resilience.We first provide an overview of the “jangle” fallacy, which serves as a basis for discussing the importance of construct discrimination to construct validity. We thereafter briefly review existing literature on the distinction, or lack thereof, between resilience and conceptually analogous constructs. Our commentary closes with a reevaluation of the potential contribution of resilience to organizational science.

The correct APA citation for this publication is:
Fogarty, G. J., & Perera, H. N. (2016). Resilience: Distinct construct or conglomerate of existing traits?. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 9, 422-429. doi:10.1017/iop.2016.33.
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