Resilience as an Outcome of Human Centered Empowerment

Organizations today are exposed to unprecedented crises. This chapter proposes that organizational resilience finds a solid basis in the empowerment of employees. Empowerment refers to the principle that individuals or groups should be enabled to determine their own development and conditions for wellbeing. Empowerment at work has positive effects on a broad range of personal and organizational outcomes. In addition, empowerment provides the psychological and structural conditions for resilience to develop and be deployed when adversity threatens to disrupt the organization. Using data from two healthcare organizations, the implementation of an empowerment strategy and a resilience response in a Covid-19 crisis situation are discussed. It is concluded that in conditions of an immediate threat a collective resilience response can effectively be triggered by the engagement of empowered professionals. Empowerment is an effective human centered strategy for implementing Human Centered Management (HCM) building resilience for personal and organizational sustainability in stressful times.