Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, United States
Resilience is widely celebrated as inherently beneficial for employees and organizations. However, expecting employees to maintain functioning after adversity may inflict hidden costs that, to date, have gone virtually unexplored. This dynamic is particularly problematic in cases of workplace sexual violence, where pressures to ‘bounce back’ risk amplifying trauma rather than facilitating healing. To examine this possibility, I conducted an inductive study of 19 cases of sexual violence in higher education using a dataset comprised of 1,929 pages of anonymized documents provided by survivors. I find that organizational power dynamics transform resilience from a potential resource into a mechanism of harm, especially when organizational actors explicitly pressure or threaten employees to ‘be resilient.’ This research challenges the unequivocal desirability of resilience by illustrating how its weaponization can perpetuate trauma under the guise of recovery.
