The five levels of resilience

Research across psychology, organisational studies and systems science highlights diverse interconnected levels at which resilience operates. To support effective professional and organisational development, Edaith sets out five codependent levels. Development at any one depends on what is happening at the others.

Most conversations about resilience focus on the individual. Can this person handle pressure? Does this team bounce back from setbacks? These are reasonable questions, but they describe only part of the picture. Resilience at the individual level is shaped by team dynamics, by organisational conditions and by the broader community and systemic contexts within which work and life occur. Treating any one level in isolation produces an incomplete understanding, and an incomplete development strategy.

Contemporary resilience research, particularly the work of scholars including Michael Ungar at Dalhousie University, understands resilience as a function of multiple interacting biological, psychological, social and ecological systems. Protective mechanisms at the individual level are difficult to sustain without supportive conditions in the social and organisational environments around them. Conversely, investment in organisational resilience that does not translate to individual capability and team cohesion remains largely theoretical.

Understanding resilience across five levels — individual, team, organisation, community and larger systems — provides a more accurate map of where capability exists, where gaps lie and where development will have the most impact.

Resilience operates at every level. Capability built at one level reinforces what is possible at the others.

Individual resilience: the foundation

Individual resilience is the starting point. Decades of research have examined what distinguishes people who maintain healthy functioning under adversity from those who do not. The findings point not to extraordinary qualities but to specific, cultivable resources: a strong sense of personal competence and self-efficacy, social adaptability, close and supportive relationships, access to external support networks and the ability to maintain structure and routine when circumstances become difficult.

Individual resilience is also the level most directly accessible to deliberate development. A person can build cognitive flexibility, expand their coping repertoire, strengthen their support networks and develop the self-awareness to recognise when they are approaching a threshold before they cross it. These capabilities do not arrive fully formed. They are built through structured practice, reflection and exposure to progressively challenging situations, the same process that underlies skill development in any domain.

Importantly, individual resilience is not a fixed state. It fluctuates in response to circumstances, workload, sleep, social conditions and the quality of the environments a person inhabits. The individual who appears highly resilient under one set of conditions may show substantially reduced capacity when those conditions change. This isn't a personal failing, it's how adaptive systems function.

Team resilience: more than the sum of individual capacities

Team resilience isn't simply the aggregated resilience of individual members. It's an emergent property, a collective state that develops through the interactions and shared processes of team members over time. Research distinguishes clearly between what individuals bring to a team and how the team functions as a unit when adversity occurs. High individual resilience does not automatically produce a resilient team. Teams require their own development.

The evidence identifies three temporal phases through which resilient teams operate: minimising, managing and mending. Minimising refers to the proactive work teams do before disruption, identifying risks, planning contingencies and building shared understanding. Managing describes how teams coordinate during a disruption itself. Mending is the reflective phase following adversity, in which teams debrief, extract lessons and translate learning into improved capability for next time.

Teams that skip the mending phase, typically because pressure to move on feels urgent, forgo the learning that makes future minimising and managing more effective. Structured reflection after challenging events is not a luxury. The research on team debriefing demonstrates measurable improvements in psychological safety, stress management and team performance when it is practised consistently.

Organisational resilience: a strategic capability

Organisational resilience is the capacity of a business or institution to maintain its essential functions through disruption, adapt to changing conditions and emerge from adversity with its capability intact or enhanced. It is not achieved through crisis management alone. Researcher Erica Seville's programme on organisational resilience in New Zealand identifies several conditions that distinguish genuinely resilient organisations: leadership that inspires and motivates, high levels of staff engagement, strong informal bonds of trust, clear situational awareness and a culture of continuous learning embedded in normal operations.

Developing organisational resilience requires both a top-down strategic commitment and bottom-up capability across teams and individuals. Organisations that invest only at the strategic level, for instance establishing resilience frameworks without building genuine capability in their people, find that those frameworks do not activate under real conditions. Organisations that focus only on individual wellbeing without structural support tend to see gains eroded by the same organisational conditions that created vulnerability in the first place.

The most resilient organisations, as journalist Diane Coutu noted in her analysis for the Harvard Business Review, share three characteristics: an unflinching acceptance of reality rather than optimistic denial, a strong sense of purpose underpinned by clear values and the capacity to improvise creatively with whatever resources are at hand. These characteristics are visible at the level of the organisation and are also cultivable at the individual and team levels, which is why multi-level development is not optional but essential.

Community and systems resilience: the wider context

Beyond the organisation, community and systems levels of resilience are increasingly relevant to how individuals and organisations function. Community resilience describes the capacity of a social group — a neighbourhood, region or sector — to prepare for, absorb, adapt to and transform in the wake of disruption. For many organisations, especially those operating in industries exposed to climate risk, supply chain volatility or regional economic shifts, community resilience is not an abstract social concern. It directly affects operational continuity.

Systems resilience takes this further, examining the properties of large-scale infrastructure and socio-technical networks, how they withstand stress, where critical vulnerabilities lie and how redundancy, diversity and adaptive capacity can be built into complex interdependent systems. Engineering frameworks for systems resilience identify four core properties that apply across contexts: robustness (the ability to withstand stress without degradation), redundancy (the capacity to substitute functions when components fail), resourcefulness (the ability to mobilise capabilities rapidly) and rapidity (how quickly recovery occurs).

Understanding the community and systems levels doesn't require deep technical expertise. Awareness that the resilience of any individual or team is shaped by forces beyond the organisation's immediate control, and that sustainable resilience development accounts for this context rather than ignoring it.

Why the levels are interconnected

Research on multisystemic resilience demonstrates that changes at one level ripple through the others. Improvements to individual resilience capability contribute to team cohesion and collective efficacy. Stronger teams create conditions in which individual development is more likely to persist. Organisational systems that support employee resilience make individual and team-level investment more effective. And organisations embedded in resilient communities have access to broader networks of support that strengthen their own adaptive capacity.

This interconnection also operates in reverse. Organisational conditions that erode employee autonomy, overload teams or deny individuals adequate recovery time will progressively undermine even well-developed individual resilience. Structural vulnerability at the community level will eventually surface as individual and organisational stress.

Getting started

Building resilience systematically requires tools and frameworks designed for each level, and a clear understanding of where current capability is strong and where it presents the greatest development opportunity.

Resilient: The Adaptive Resilience & Agility Toolkit is available at edaith.com. It provides evidence-based frameworks and 30 practical tools for developing resilience across individual, team, organisational, community and systems levels. For professionals seeking a precise picture of their individual resilience capability across key dimensions, the Adaptive Resilience & Agility Capability Profile is available at edaith.com and delivers a personalised development report grounded in the same research framework. Volume pricing applies for teams of five or more. For team and organisational implementation, including aggregated team reporting, contact Edaith.