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Interest in psychological resilience has grown rapidly in the last couple of decades (Britt, Sinclair, & McFadden, 2016; King & Rothstein, 2010; Youssef & Luthans, 2007). Psychological resilience occurs when a person can “recover, re-bound, bounce-back, adjust or even thrive” in the face of adversity (Garcia-Dia, DiNapoli, Garcia-Ona, Jakubowski, & O’flaherty, 2013, p. 264). As such, resilience can be conceptualized as a state-like and malleable construct that can be enhanced in response to stressful events (Kossek & Perrigino, 2016). It incorporates a dynamic process by which individuals use protective factors (internal and external) to positively adapt to stress over time (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Rutter, 1987). Building on the dual-pathway model of resilience, we integrate adaptive and proactive coping to the resilience development process and add a heretofore unexamined perspective to the ways in which resilience changes over time. We propose that resilience development trajectories differ depending on the type of adversity or stress experienced in combination with the use of adaptive and proactive coping. We outline the need for future longitudinal studies to examine these relationships and the implications for developing resilience interventions in the workplace.

The 2008 economic and financial crisis has particularly hit Italy, forcing governments to cope with unprecedented shocks affecting their financial conditions. Drawing on the resilience concept, the chapter aims to investigate what capacities are deployed and developed by Italian local governments to respond to such shocks. Based on a multiple case study, it explores the role of organisational features and capacities, as well as the characteristics of the external environment, in affecting responses and the related results. From the analysis it emerges that different capacities have been deployed by Italian municipalities to anticipate and cope with financial shocks in recent years, leading to four main patterns of financial resilience: proactive and internally driven, fatalist, constrained and contented resilience. The contribution highlights that simply relying on (past) wealthy conditions, or accumulating resources, is not sufficient for coping with shocks. By contrast, it emphasises the importance of investing on anticipating the consequences of negative events.

Since 2010, Dutch local authorities (LGs) have been coping with fiscal stress and austerity. Restoring fiscal balance is difficult for Dutch LGs as they have very limited abilities to increase the level of local income. Fundamental choices regarding policy priorities and public services are required to reduce fiscal deficits. An in-depth case study of four carefully selected LGs revealed three typical financial shocks in the Netherlands: the reduction of national transfers to LGs, the decentralisation of national tasks to LGs without corresponding budgets and the declined value of municipal assets (construction land). The perceived vulnerability for financial shocks is relatively high in Dutch LGs due to their undiversified and uncertain revenue sources. This chapter illustrates that while the anticipatory capacity initially was low, many efforts have been made since 2010 improving risk management and medium-term financial planning. Dutch LGs have typically deployed short-term and long-term responses to cope with austerity. Regarding the short-term, two types of responses were commonly used to balance the budget: cutting costs and postponing investments. Long-term responses were deployed to realign actual operational outputs with strategically desired outputs. Sticking to strategic plans was not easy as financial shocks evolved quickly. An important long-term response in the Netherlands was the ‘transition of the role of government in society’, moving from a proactive self-organising type of government towards a more passive, coordinating type of government. No evidence was found for radical changes of the financial system.

Economic stressors such as job insecurity, job loss, unemployment, and underemployment cause severe difficulties for the workers affected, their families, organizations, and societies overall. Consequently, most past research has taken a thoroughly negative perspective on economic stress, addressing its diverse negative consequences and the ways that people try to cope with them. And even when following the advice provided by the scientific literature, people affected by economic stress will usually end up being off worse than they were before the onset of the stressor.

The current chapter pays credit to this perspective yet also tries to counterbalance it with an alternative one. While acknowledging the vast amount of literature outlining the negative consequences of economic stress on peoples’ well-being and careers, some literature also points at opportunities for a more positive perspective. More specifically, we argue that affected people can use a wide repertoire of behaviors for handling their current situation. Of particular promise in this regard is the concept of career adaptability, generally defined as the ability to change to fit into new career-related circumstances. Indeed, studies show that under certain conditions, career adaptability can facilitate people's search for not just any job but for a qualitatively better job, thus breaking through the spiral of losses usually associated with economic stress.

For the purpose of this argument, we link career adaptability to the concept of proactive coping, analyzing how and under which conditions career adaptability may present a contextualized form of proactive coping. We then address known personal and situational antecedents of career adaptability and show how career adaptability may be fostered and trained among different types of job seekers. We end this chapter with a discussion of open questions as well as directions for future research.

Ambitious though it is to summarise the richness of experiences emerging from the country chapters in a few lines, in this concluding chapter we attempt a short synthesis and interpretation, searching for different approaches to resilience and the underlying contextual and organisational explanatory variables. In doing so, we summarise what we have learned about the financial resilience of local governments across 11 countries and discuss possible developments and future research avenues.

While the financial crisis – in some way – impacted most of the countries included in this book, the effects on local governments were not uniform, with some being affected immediately and/or more substantially than others, partly due to the proximity of the crisis, the natural effects of pre-existing fiscal profiles and intergovernmental relations or national coping policies.

The analysis conducted across the 45 local shows that resilience can take different forms, but that important commonalities can be identified across countries. This reveals that there is no one single approach to resilience and that organisations have the choice, based on their latent capacities and how they perceive their vulnerability in the face of a crisis, over which pathway they follow.

The different patterns of financial resilience that emerge can be interpreted as the result of the dynamic interplay among the dimensions of anticipatory capacity, coping capacity and financial shocks, as well as a local government’s associated vulnerability to them.

In this chapter, the development of financial sustainability and resilience in Swedish local governments is analysed. We analyse four Swedish municipalities, where we have interviewed top managers and co-workers. As a complement, we have examined the municipalities’ strategic plans, budget documents and annual reports. We also contextualise this analysis with other findings from local government research during this time, as well as with central government initiatives. In summary, we examine why Swedish municipalities in general remained strong after the financial crisis by showing how they strengthened their anticipatory and coping capacities over time – something that, in the cases of this chapter, was achieved before the 2008/2009 crisis in response to previous crises, rather than because of it. We also show that this is not the only reason. As Swedish finances were comparatively stable, and the problems of the banking sector relatively small, the financial shocks to the municipalities could be overcome relatively easily.

This chapter analyses the financial resilience pattern presented by four Brazilian municipalities at the beginning of a serious revenue downturn, which was initiated at the central government as a combination of economic and political crises. The crisis occurred during an on-going public financial management reform and attempts to imbricate IPSAS-oriented accrual-accounting policies in a dominant cash-based budgeting culture. Thus, contrasting those patterns with other democracies depicted in this book, we aim to contribute to the comparative literature on financial resilience under austerity periods. We interviewed secretaries of finance, department directors and accountants of each city hall and businessmen from the four municipalities. Cases were selected among 100,000-350,000 inhabitants’ municipalities from one of the three most industrialised brazilian states, varying the cases according to their mean and volatility budgetary surplus over the 10 years before the beginning of the analysed crises. All cases presented no anticipatory capacity or long-term strategic planning. Their usual responses are short-term oriented, such as supplier payments postponement, increasing tax collection or cutting expenditures, rather than based on their weak transformative capacities. Despite the fatalistic and very ineffective reactive behaviours observed in two cases, a proactive mayor, supported by consulting firms, enhanced the responses effectiveness of the two remaining cases. Hence, mayor leadership might be a fruitful feature to be investigated by future studies.

Small businesses are dominant in most economies and their owners likely experience high levels of distress. However, we have not fully explored how these common businesses meaningfully differ with respect to the stress process. Understanding the meaningful variations or subgroups (i.e., heterogeneity) in the small business population will advance occupational health psychology, both in research and practice (e.g., Schonfeld, 2017; Stephan, 2018). To systematize these efforts, the author identifies five commonly appearing “heterogeneity factors” from the literature as modifiers of stressors or the stress process among small business owners. These five heterogeneity factors include: owner centrality, individual differences, gender differences, business/ownership type, and time. After synthesizing the research corresponding to each of these five factors, the author offers specific suggestions for identifying and incorporating relevant heterogeneity factors in future investigations of small business owners’ stress. The author closes by discussing implications for advancing occupational health theories.

The United States (U.S.) has been described as the root of the global financial crisis. The events of the financial, sovereign debt, and Euro crisis and the accompanying economic turmoil that have spread throughout most of the Western world have been traced back to the excessive consumer borrowing, sub-prime mortgage lending and ultimately the housing bubble in the United States. Its burst in 2008 created a shock that overshadowed prior recession and fiscal stress of governmental entities in the United States. Deriving over 90% of their own tax revenues from property taxes, local governments in Michigan have been hit even more excessively. However, the cases analysed in this chapter not only tell a unique story of deep shock and legacy costs, but also of creative ways of surviving the crisis, exerting different patterns of financial resilience. In general, state regulations restricted buffering the impact, and some cities additionally suffered from their geographical vicinity to and economic dependency on Detroit, a city that stands for the turbulence of the U.S. automobile industry. After first deploying buffering capacities that still existed, two cases saw the crisis as an opportunity to address their vulnerabilities (reactive adapters), an opportunity that was not recognised in the case of a constrained adapter. In contrast, one case showed strong anticipatory and coping capacities that have been built up in the past, equipping the local government to operate in a lean and efficient way, and to proactively adapt to arising shocks.

Unfolding almost a decade ago, the global financial crisis still affects governments all over the world. Austria has been hit only moderately, showing one of the lowest debt and unemployment levels in the European Union throughout the crisis years. However, the crisis’ aftermath affected the financial situation of Austrian local governments significantly. Although they are self-administered and exert high political and functional autonomy, local governments rely heavily on shared tax revenues with the federal level. These shared revenues as well as local governments’ own tax revenues declined, mirroring the economic turmoil following the financial crisis. This chapter aims to explore how Austrian local governments responded to these challenges. It does so by investigating the contextual conditions as well as internal capacities through the lens of financial resilience. All four cases included in the analysis highlighted that institutional conditions and general trends, e.g. tasks devolved from upper levels of government without sufficient compensation, limit their ability to cope with financial shocks. In this context, different patterns of financial resilience can be observed. While two cases initially showed low anticipatory and coping capacities, awareness of decision-makers resulted in building internal capacities and in making necessary changes early or as a response to the shock. The other two, however, seem to rest on their laurels of strong capacities in the past, and to rely mainly on their buffering capacities in reacting to shocks, thus increasing their vulnerability in the future.