Resilience in the Margins: Understanding resilience strategies of disempowered and marginalised senior leaders in the workplace.

Systemic Review

This paper aims to critically evaluate the resilience strategies used by racialised leaders to enable them to overcome the barriers they face. A systematic search to identify qualitative studies was conducted across three electronic databases: PsychINFO, Business Source Premier and Web of Science. Thirteen studies met the inclusion criteria, from USA, Canada and UK and several industries. These were quality assessed and thematically synthesised. Three domains were identified as integral to understanding this area: (1) racialised micro-aggressions; (2) cost of fighting; and (3) resilience strategies used to overcome the micro-aggressions. Results suggest modern covert racism is evident within organisations. In the face of this, racialised leaders have developed individual and collective strategies to enable them to be resilient. Although some racialised individuals make it to leadership positions, this comes at a cost (health, psychological and emotional) to the individual. Organisations need to shift the burden of responsibility from the individual to address the prevailing Whiteness embedded within organisational systems.

Empirical project

The study sought to understand what resilience strategies senior female leaders in the clinical psychology profession use. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 senior female clinical psychology leaders. Transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Three themes were generated: (1) Toxic Culture (2) Surviving within the system (3) Striving for change. The findings suggest that toxic work cultures are a challenge for senior female clinical psychologist leaders. They predominantly used individual resilience strategies to overcome these. However, these can come at an individual cost i.e. emotional burnout, low mood, stress and sleeping difficulties. Collective resilience strategies were used less often and were not focused on collectively changing the system. Collective resilience using critical consciousness model could enable lasting system and cultural change.