Abstract:

Team resilience is the key to successful risk response, rapid recovery and even growth in a crisis. It has been pointed out that team resilience is not only the capacity of a team to bounce back from adversity, but also a dynamic psychological process and a shared belief. However, there is a paucity of team-level resilience research compared to the individual and organizational levels. The limited literature suffers from two deficiencies. First, the predominance of studies that consider team resilience as a capability neglects the understanding of where the capability comes from, i.e., the dynamic development of team resilience and the emergence of consensus. Second, the antecedents of team resilience have been less studied with a focus on leadership style and empirical research needs to be enriched.
Against this backdrop, the theoretical mechanism behind the formation of team resilience by leader mindfulness is constructed by adopting three perspectives: the capacity perspective, the process perspective and the belief perspective. First, we identify the path mechanism of leader mindfulness to enhance team resilience. Considering the mechanisms of team work anxiety absorption, team emotional carrying capacity as sequential mediators and team performance as moderator, the present study provides a theoretical explanation framework to systematically clarify when and how leader mindfulness promotes the formation of team resilience. Second, we reveal the dynamic pattern of team resilience development through positive leadership thinking. Based on the within-team level, we analyze the “social-cognitive” resource change mechanisms that influence the change of team resilience due to the change of leader mindfulness. In the “social-cognitive” resource change mechanism, the team psychological safety represents the social resource change mechanism and team cognitive reappraisal represents the cognitive resource change mechanism. The findings help to better understand the underlying dynamics of team resilience development. Third, to clarify the emergence of a consensus process of leader mindfulness for team resilience belief, we focused on team sense-making as a mediating role and team emotional integration as a moderating role. The results provide a more comprehensive theoretical explanation to clarify and enhance the effectiveness of leader mindfulness in promoting team resilience.
The study is the first attempt to explore the integration of two relatively independent literatures on “leader mindfulness” and “team resilience”, and to clarify the enriching connotation of team resilience through the integrated perspective. The integrated perspective of team resilience emphasizes that team resilience is not only a team capability, but also as a team interaction process and team shared belief emergence. The research topic is based on social needs, responding to practical concerns and theoretical explorations, and is the first to reveal the potential impact of leader mindfulness on the formation of team resilience. In terms of research perspectives, we expand the research landscape dominated by the capability perspective, based on three perspectives: the capacity perspective, the process perspective and the belief perspective, to understand how team resilience comes from. The research design focuses on a hybrid study, taking into account both dynamic processes and static results, to more accurately portray the development pattern between leader mindfulness and team resilience. It also provides innovative theoretical explanations for leadership development and team resilience in turbulent business environments. The study not only reveals the relationship between leader mindfulness and team resilience more comprehensively, but also enriches the research on the antecedents of leader characteristics in team resilience, expanding the scope of team resilience studies and linking the theoretical gaps in the literature on leader mindfulness and team resilience. Our research provides novel insights into leadership development in turbulent business environments, offering practical strategies for how teams can survive and even thrive in the face of adversity.

Key words: leader mindfulness, team resilience, capacity, psychosocial process, shared belief