Strengthening team resilience. A longitudinal evaluation of a Multi-Component Team Intervention

Abstract

Background: Organizations are increasingly confronted with complex, dynamic, and stressful working conditions. In this context, team resilience, the ability of teams to cope with adversity and emerge stronger from it, is becoming increasingly important. Team resilience is understood as the collective ability to cope with unexpected, stressful, or disruptive events without losing performance or cohesion (Alliger, Cerasoli, Tannenbaum, & Vessey, 2015). Team resilience is understood as a construct consisting of three components: team resilience capacity, team resilience mechanisms, and team resilience demonstration (Fisher, LeNoble, & Vanhove, 2023).

Despite considerable progress in the study of individual resilience interventions, evidence-based approaches for systematically strengthening team resilience are still rare (Hartwig, Clarke, Johnson, & Willis, 2020). This project examines the effectiveness and acceptance of a newly developed, modular intervention framework for systematically strengthening team resilience capacity and its effects on team resilience demonstration.

Method: The study follows a longitudinal pre-post design with a follow-up survey. Around 80 teams from various organizations participated in a multi-part team intervention based on the intervention framework for strengthening team resilience (Baumgartner, Waldner, & Krause, 2025). The intervention begins with an assessment workshop (factor check) in which team members jointly reflect on the initial situation and prioritize three out of nine factors that operationalize team resilience. This is followed by three in-depth workshops, each scheduled about a month apart, in which the selected factors are specifically addressed. The entire process lasts four to six months and is facilitated by team internal or external moderators. The evaluation measures changes in team resilience capacity, operationalized across nine factors (shared goals, role clarity, clarity about decisions, team communication, mutual support, conflict management, team reflection, continuous learning, team flexibility). In addition, perceived adversities and indicators of team resilience demonstration (team productivity, psychological safety, and mental health) are collected.

Results: Data collection will be completed in February 2026. The analyses will be carried out in March and April 2026. The results will be presented at the conference.

Conclusion: The project empirically tests a new, theory-driven, and practical intervention framework that aims to strengthen team resilience in the long term. The study thus contributes to the validation of the intervention framework and to the scientific foundation of interventions in the field of team resilience. At the same time, it provides valuable insights for organizations on how to design team processes in a way that promotes psychological safety, shared learning processes, and collective adaptability in the long term.