Towards Understanding How Teams Overcome Setbacks: A Longitudinal Study on the Emergence and Impact of Team Resilience

As teams increasingly face dynamic and high-pressure work, understanding how they bounce back from adversity is critical. This study investigates how team resilience capacity develops and its implications for performance under adversity. We present findings from a 16-week longitudinal study of 171 graduate students in 38 consulting teams. Teams were surveyed every four weeks to assess team resilience capacity, cohesion, trust, and psychological safety; team performance was assessed between surveys via instructor evaluation. We used linear mixed-effects models to examine variance between and within teams over time. Results suggest high team resilience capacity buffers the association of higher adversity and lower performance. Teams with higher trust and psychological safety had higher resilience capacity. Within teams, higher resilience capacity occurred at times when cohesion, trust, and psychological safety were higher. Altogether, results suggest that team resilience capacity emerges in contexts that enable teams to recognize, access, and integrate their resources to address adversity. We conclude that team resilience capacity is critical for teams who regularly encounter high adversity to avoid performance decrements. We contribute a novel model on the emergence and impact of team resilience capacity, as well as a list of directions for future research to continue advancing the science of team resilience.