The role of resilience in navigating work stress and achieving daily work goals

On a daily basis, resilience is critical for employees to cope with difficulties and challenges in achieving work goals. Understanding the dynamic resilience process throughout the workday is crucial for gaining insights into how employees can effectively leverage their resilience to meet their daily work goals. The present study aims to examine this dynamic resilience process in response to work stress while pursuing work goals among employees with different levels of trait resilience. Drawing on resilience literature and the conservation of resources theory, we propose a resilience-depleting process in response to morning work stress within a short, half-day timeframe. We further examine whether state resilience impacts subsequent work goal striving at the within-person level. Additionally, we explore the buffering effect of trait resilience on the resilience-depleting process after experiencing work stress. To test our hypotheses, we employed the experience sampling methodology with 108 full-time employees over five consecutive workdays. Multilevel analyses revealed that morning work stress significantly diminished state resilience, indirectly influencing daily work goal progress through work goal activation. Notably, trait resilience buffered the negative impact of work stress on state resilience. These results offer insights into theoretical understanding and practical implications for managing employee state resilience in the face of work stress to achieve daily work goals.