Dyer-The Intersection of Resilience and Global Leadership in a VUCA World

Αρετή (Arete) Journal of Excellence in Global Leadership | Vol. 1 No. 1 | 2022

definition, measurement, and role in developing competencies across various disciplines and, to a lesser degree, leadership resilience as an application. McLeod and Dulsky (2021) were among the researchers to look at how the COVID-19 pandemic has helped to create an entire body of research around the construct of resilience in the context of crisis leadership as they considered its impact on school leadership during the early months of the pandemic. Behnke and Eckhard (2022) explored the constructs of crisis and resilience and proposed that resilience can enhance crisis management techniques by looking at the relationship between the two systematically, including learning and trust building. The construct of global leadership resilience during VUCA times is understanding how leaders succeed during pressure and how they come back from complex, multilateral, and cross-cultural disruption on a global scale. Lombardi et al. (2021) offer that improvisation plays a role in developing resilient leaders in the face of adversity as they looked at how to apply what leaders in the hospitality industry learned about resilience as they weathered the adversity of the pandemic. The literature varies broadly in its definition of resilience. It is a construct, characteristic, attribute, method, effect, collection of factors within other constructs, and theory. One study presents resilience as a collection of positive leadership traits, or "psychological capital components," which include "hope, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy" that, when combined, create a genuinely resilient leader (Breen, 2017, p. 42). Fisher and Law (2020) agree that the complexity of the construct leads it to be vaguely defined as both a phenomenon and an actionable outcome. Reid and Botterill (2013) suggest that the definition of resilience during times of disruption is more than an elasticity as it incorporates the tenets of growth, adaptation, and change. Southwick et al. (2017) agree that leadership is vital to creating solid organizational resilience following times of crisis. Adaptive Resilience Theory offers leadership as one of four components of the construct (Nilakant et al., 2014). This research explores the role of leadership competencies, noting that empathy and communication are crucial to resilience recovery and renewal. Madrigano et al. (2017) used an analysis of disaster preparedness to frame how communities adapt to challenges following disasters, pointing out that gaps remain in the research about how resilience is used in practice. Hendrikx et al. (2022) looked at resilience as a capacity measure for healthcare teams during the COVID-19 pandemic to study the phenomenon of team resilience and its impacts on individuals’ well -being and their ability to bounce back. Hartwig et al. (2020) concurred that the research on team resilience is lacking compared to that on individual resilience factors and that more information is needed to understand this type of resilience so that it may be operationalized in the future. Although the resilience literature is vast, the complexity of formulating, refining, and applying the construct of resilience as an application remains a common theme. The areas of leadership resilience, organizational resilience, and team resilience leave room for further study as leaders in the workplace continue to face the impacts of global adversity. The VUCA World – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity The term VUCA has grown to encompass events and occurrences that create global disruption, including wars and conflicts, refugee migrations, financial crises, natural disasters, climate change, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic (Bagwell,

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