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Resilience through Leadership 61

to the extreme dangers they faced in the Antarctic. He could infl uence them
by making obvious his personal qualities and leadership characteristics, and
he could influence them by his actions and behavior. Clearly, by his character

as well as his behavior, Shackleton performed as an effective leader. He was

able to exert a substantial degree of infl uence over his fellow explorers, who
willingly accepted his influence and followed his leadership. Somehow,

then, through this dynamic or the processes essential to it, resilience helped
Shackleton and his men endure the relentless physical and extreme psycho-
logical demands of a seemingly hopeless situation in an extraordinarily harsh

environment. This raises the question of how eff ective leadership can inure
the leader and his or her followers to extreme stress. Before we can address

this issue, we must first explore the nature of resilience itself.

Concepts of Biobehavioral Resilience

The term “resilience” has its roots in material science, where it refers to the
capacity of a strained body to recover its size and shape aft er compressive
stress deformation. As a behavioral scientific construct, resilience is defi ned

in different ways by different researchers who view resilience as a trait, as
a capacity, or as an outcome. Here, we adopt the view that resilience is the

capacity to cope with or adapt to significant risk and adversity and to recover
quickly from stressful change or misfortune.

There is great interest in the characteristics and processes that enable
individuals and groups to “bounce back” after experiencing substantial

reverses of fortune. Consequently, resilience has been studied by research-
ers in a number of different disciplines and reported in various literatures,

including business and organizational psychology (e.g., Maddi, 2002; Maddi &
Khoshaba, 2005; Youssef & Luthans, 2005), family counseling (e.g., Walsh,
1998, 2002), and child development (e.g., Luthar, Cicchetti & Becker, 2000).

Among these various fields of interest, there is general agreement concerning
specific experiences and characteristics that make some individuals, units,

or organizations more or less resilient to stress than others. Taken together,
these factors suggest that resilience is not so much a trait (something a
person has) as it is a process (something a person does; cf. Siebert, 2002).
Thus, although physiology and genetics certainly play an important role in

resilience (see Baker, Risbrough & Schork, this volume; Friedl & Penetar, this
volume), evidence indicates that people can also learn to be resilient through
experience and by developing qualities that facilitate coping, adaptation, and
recovery from stress (e.g., Luthans, Vogelgesang & Lester, 2006; Maddi &
Khoshaba, 2005).
In the effort to identify qualities and characteristics essential to

resilience, different investigators have adopted different approaches and

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