Fostering Team Resilience Through Stressor Exposure: An Identity-Based Model and the Role of Charismatic Leadership

In today’s complex and turbulent business environment, it is increasingly important to understand how teams can build the ability to cope with and recover from adverse situations. Drawing on social identity theory and the self-enhancement prospect perspective, we propose that team resilience can be developed through exposure to team work stressors and the resulting identity-based mechanisms. Our model also examines the role of charismatic leadership in this process. Using a time-lagged, multisource survey of 167 teams in China, we found that team challenge stressors enhance team resilience capacity by fostering collective team identification, whereas team hindrance stressors undermine team resilience capacity by weakening this identification. Additionally, charismatic leadership strengthens the positive effects of challenge stressors on collective team identification and alleviates the detrimental impact of team hindrance stressors, ultimately enhancing team resilience capacity. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed.