In times of ongoing global change and amid a trend of work intensification, today's employees face increased pressure at work, ranging from small to more chronic stressors, such as excessive job demands or challenging working conditions across different occupational contexts. In light of those challenges, adverse situations may not only affect employees' performance but can also seriously threaten their mental health and well-being (e.g., Schaufeli and Greenglass, 2001). This development has become even more pronounced during the recent COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences, including major changes in occupational settings (Teng-Calleja et al., 2020). Due to the need for social distancing, mandatory lockdowns, and isolation periods, the pandemic has brought with it even more challenges associated with work-related stress (Giorgi et al., 2020) and substantial costs to individuals and organizations. In response to those challenges, growing attention has been paid to resilience, which can be defined as an employee's ability to manage and positively overcome stress and adversity at work but also to grow though them (Mancini and Bonanno, 2009; King and Rothstein, 2010; Cooper et al., 2013; Fletcher and Sarkar, 2013; Johnston et al., 2015; Kossek and Perrigino, 2016). Therefore, the question arises regarding how to design effective resilience training programs that could help individual members of organizations improve their resilience and well-being.

Given the increased demands in organizational contexts and the importance of resilience, a growing number of resilience training programs have provided insights into training outcomes and elements. Studies including resilience training programs have been reported to show positive impacts on the mental health and subjective well-being of employees (e.g., Grant et al., 2009; Pipe et al., 2012). Moreover, some studies have also reported positive changes in performance or other work-related benefits (e.g., Grant et al., 2009; Pipe et al., 2012). A review of studies regarding resilience training in organizational contexts conducted by Robertson et al. (2015) and meta-analyses performed by Leppin et al. (2014) and Vanhove et al. (2016) all revealed support for the assumption that resilience training could positively affect employees' resilience as well as their well-being and performance at work. The reviews, however, also highlight that resilience training programs differ in their approaches and implementation and that “no single accepted theoretical framework or consensus statement exists to guide the development or application of those programs” (Leppin et al., 2014; p. 2). The purpose of this scoping review is to uncover what is known about resilience training programs in organizational contexts. By applying a scoping approach, we were able to build upon earlier reviews and summarize the state of research by integrating new insights from current studies published through 2021. In this article, we first present the applied review and analysis methods, followed by the results of our review. Finally, we discuss our findings and provide possible directions for future research.

A literature review was conducted based on the guidelines for scoping reviews (Arksey and O'Malley, 2005, PRISMA-ScR: Tricco et al., 2018). According to Arksey and O'Malley's (2005) methodological approach for scoping reviews, the following five stages were conducted: (1) identifying the research questions, (2) identifying the studies, (3) selecting the studies, (4) extracting and charting the data, and (5) summarizing the results.

First, the reviewed studies showed that resilience training programs are usually applied in high-risk contexts and focused on employees who are regularly confronted with high levels of stress (e.g., police officers, military members, or doctors). Even though the prevention and treatment of stress and burnout, as well as the promotion of well-being and resilience, are particularly important in these contexts, studies of employees in regular business settings (e.g., office work) remain rare. Nevertheless, we already know that these employees also face increasing pressure at work (e.g., Fletcher and Sarkar, 2013). Furthermore, as resilience has been conceptualized as a context-related construct (Kossek and Perrigino, 2016), it cannot be assumed that one resilience training is also relevant and can be conducted without adaptation in another context. Moreover, further attention should be paid to employees in managerial posts. Here, issues like standard overtime, work–life imbalance, or an irregular schedule are often cause for burnout or early retirement (Foerster and Duchek, 2017). Although there is recent research concerning organizational leaders' resilience and leaders' resilience-enhancing factors (e.g., Bossmann et al., 2016; Foerster and Duchek, 2017), no specific training programs have yet been developed and evaluated.

Second, a broad range of different training programs have been applied in organizations. Program characteristics, such as conceptual backgrounds, aims and contents, vary widely. As this heterogeneity has been stated by other reviews before (e.g., Robertson et al., 2015; Vanhove et al., 2016), our approach included clustering the articles due to the applied training programs (e.g., RAW, R2MR) or their common basis, such as mindfulness. Building on our results, multi-modal and specific single-focused training programs can be distinguished. A lot of studies focused on multi-modal resilience programs, which were based on more than one conceptual and/or methodological background and vary in their aims and contents. These contents include aspects, such as psycho-education about various health-related topics, relaxation techniques, social support, reflective thinking, goal setting, and/or problem solving. As mentioned before, some studies applied a single-focused (e.g., professional coaching or mindfulness) program or focus on other specific resilience training programs (e.g., Imagery-Based Trauma Prevention Training Program). Taken together, even though the number of studies on resilience development in the organizational context has risen largely, research is still in an early developmental stage.

Third, in terms of delivery mode (i.e., delivery media and forms of interaction) of the resilience training programs, the reviewed studies show a range of different strategies. While most of the studies focused on training programs applied on a face-to-face basis, several implemented online training, and a few applied approaches that combined online and face-to-face sessions. In keeping with increasing digitalization and—over the past 17 months—current regulations designed to contain the spread of COVID-19, numerous online-based training programs have been developed in recent years. Their effectiveness, however, remains to be examined, especially as Vanhove et al. (2016) meta-analysis showed computer-based training programs to be less effective than face-to-face programs. Additionally, the form of interaction should be taken into account. Most training programs applied forms of group interaction or a combined form of group and individual work (e.g., completing worksheets at home). Some conducted one-on-one meetings between a participant and an instructor (e.g., a digital or live coaching session) or individual work without support. Most of the latter categories were part of online-based programs. Given the discussed aspects—that is, effectiveness of digital or face-to-face formats and interaction forms in training programs—blended learning could combine the strengths of both approaches (combination of online module and offline learning) and therefore be a flexible, cost-effective way to strengthen employees' resources (see, e.g., Tonkin et al., 2018). Additional research is needed to gain further insight into the feasibility and effectiveness of different delivery and interaction formats.

Forth, another important aspect that varied between the resilience training programs was their duration. Results show that training programs range from short, single-session ones to regular weekly and/or full-day sessions. Despite the documented effects of short-term training sessions (e.g., Sood et al., 2011), the application of what has been learned, must be repeatedly applied in practice and transferred to new or other tasks (e.g., Andergassen et al., 2014). This could be achieved through short-term refresher courses that can become flexible, effective extensions of full training programs. These were applied in some training programs as “booster sessions,” at, for example, 1 and 4 months after the initial training (Pidgeon et al., 2013) or via follow-up sessions or phone calls (Sood et al., 2011; Sharma et al., 2014; Chesak et al., 2015). Because this practice was applied in only a few of the studies, regular (e.g., weekly) and follow-up courses should generally be part of future implementations, instead of the previously applied one-time sessions. This will not only allow participants to overcome potential shortcomings in learning and applying new knowledge and skills, but will also allow study conductors to run long-term analysis.

Fifth, examining the study descriptions, among the studies reviewed, fewer than half of the studies evaluated resilience training programs in organizations following a RCT design. In addition, a high prevalence of studies lacked a control group, making it difficult to control for external effects and/or generalize findings. Future resilience training studies should include control groups and use the RCT design to produce more reliable findings. Ideally, control groups should be recruited from the same occupation and organization. The control group could either receive an alternative non-resilience related training or receive the same resilience training after the last measurement of the experimental group (waiting list control group). Additionally, suitable sample sizes should be calculated and procured to ensure the success of such designs. The effect sizes reported in the existing studies can form a basis for calculating sample sizes for future training evaluations of existing programs. When planning a training evaluation, this review also highlighted the importance of recruiting more than the minimum number of suitable participants due to high dropout rates in some programs (e.g., Carr et al., 2013; Buchanan and Reilly, 2019). The included studies offer no insight into why participants drop out of resilience training, and a scientific evaluation is needed to detect whether these reasons lay in the organizational context or the acceptance of participants. As authors have treated their report on drop-out rates very differently, no consistent picture emerges regarding the existence, number of, or reasons for drop-out.

Sixth, the included outcome measures to evaluate resilience training programs showed a large variety. This underlines the observations by Windle et al. (2011) that there is no “gold standard” in resilience measurements and shows that this observation can be confirmed for the studies included in this review. Few studies describe why the chosen resilience measures were used, but CD-RISC was the most often used scale to assess resilience. Resilience measured via CD-RISC represents trait resilience (e.g., Singh and Yu, 2010; Wollny and Jacobs, 2021), but in the training context resilience is operationalized as a changeable variable; and thus, it is important to use resilience scales that match the theoretical considerations (Linz et al., 2020). With most studies finding positive effects for resilience outcomes and a reduction in stress, resilience training programs seem to be effective and fulfilling their purpose. Effectiveness was also shown for mental-health outcomes and well-being, but fewer studies could report significant improvements in these variables. Work-related outcomes seem to be positively influenced by resilience training, especially if they are closely related to the concept of resilience (e.g., resilience at work, work–family spillover). While significant positive relationships with various desirable outcomes could be found, the studies allow no conclusions to be drawn about causality. The heterogeneous characteristics of the training programs did not allow to mark single training characteristics as advantageous or disadvantageous. It is only possible to acknowledge that most resilience training programs showed positive effects.

Finally, we can conclude that recent research has not yet systematically focused on instructional design aspects of resilience training programs. The description of the design and implementation of resilience training programs (e.g., specific learning objectives or assessment approaches) in some studies was limited, precluding a more in-depth analysis and presentation of the findings. Some aspects, like duration, delivery mode, forms of interaction, and an overview of the content, have been part of the training programs in the analyzed studies. However, these aspects do not seem to have been deliberately designed according to an instructional framework. Regarding the current results of this review, it can be seen that most of the authors have not included this aspect in their research or—at least—have not reported on it in their publications. This needs to be further analyzed, with special regard to instructional design of resilience training programs.

In recent years, research has leveraged and extended the findings generated in previous reviews. Still, while progress has been made, some research gaps remain that should be addressed by future studies to provide a more comprehensive understanding of resilience training in organizational contexts. We hope that this scoping review can raise awareness of the importance of resilience training research in an organizational context. Specifically, future research should address the roles of different resilience training programs, their conceptual backgrounds, and their related outcomes more precisely to help organizations choose or develop resilience training programs in three ways. First, by taking a closer look at different contexts, it becomes apparent that the identified professional backgrounds are not equally represented in the considered studies. For example, most training programs are implemented with general employees or employees working in high-risk environments; only a few programs focus on employees in business settings. In addition, few studies specify the hierarchical positions of their participants, so there is less knowledge of the level of resilience development for specific target groups within organizations. Second, as we provided insights into program characteristics and outcome measures, future research could consider how different program characteristics or, especially, delivery modes (e.g., face-to-face vs. online) may affect the outcomes of resilience training programs. Overall, more research is needed to implement the criteria for success in the design and implementation of resilience training programs in organizations themselves as well as the training conditions of the organizational context. Third, an interesting future direction has opened up in the research regarding the instructional frameworks and designs of resilience training programs for employees. Although some design aspects were included in the examined training programs, these aspects do not seem to have been deliberately designed according to an instructional framework or include instructional approaches. Future studies could, therefore, focus on instructional design aspects and analyze which forms of learning are especially relevant for resilience training programs in general and in the organizational context in particular.

IS provided the idea for the study, designed the research plan and the review protocol, co-developed the assessment, supervised the analyses, and co-wrote the manuscript. NP co-developed the assessment, conducted the analyses and interpretation, and co-wrote the manuscript (program characteristics). ML co-developed the assessment, conducted the analyses and interpretation, and co-wrote the manuscript (study design and outcomes). CM co-developed the assessment, conducted the analyses and interpretation, and co-wrote the manuscript (target group). CA and BF supervised the analyses and were involved in preparing and reviewing the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article, reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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