Personal resilience as a strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of workplace adversity: a literature review

This paper is a report of a literature review to explore the concept of personal resilience as a strategy for responding to workplace adversity and to identify strategies to enhance personal resilience in nurses.

Workplace adversity in nursing is associated with excessive workloads, lack of autonomy, bullying and violence and organizational issues such as restructuring, and has been associated with problems retaining nurses in the workforce. However, despite these difficulties many nurses choose to remain in nursing, and survive and even thrive despite a climate of workplace adversity. DATA SOURCES: The literature CINAHL, EBSCO, Medline and Pubmed databases were searched from 1996 to 2006 using the keywords 'resilience', 'resilience in nursing', and 'workplace adversity' together with 'nursing'. Papers in English were included.