Adversity in Elite Sport and Resilience in the Workplace

Bridging the Gap Podcast

Author: Mustafa Sarkar

Dr. Mustafa Sarkar is a Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology at Nottigham Trent University. Dr Sarkar is also a member of the Sport, Health, and Performance Enhancement (SHAPE) research group. His research focuses on the psychology of sporting excellence and its application to other high performance domains (e.g., business). His work addresses how high achievers thrive on pressure and deliver sustained success. Specific research areas include psychological and team resilience, growth and thriving, sport psychology consultancy.

Studies:

Study 1: What Doesn’t Kill Me: Adversity-Related Experiences are Vital in the Development of Superior Olympic Performance

Study 2: Resilience training in the workplace from 2003 to 2014: A systematic review

Abstract:

Study 1: Objectives: Recent research suggests that experiencing some adversity can have beneficial outcomes for human growth and development. The purpose of this paper was to explore the adversities that the world's best athletes encounter and the perceived role that these experiences play in their psychological and performance development. Design: A qualitative design was employed because detailed information of rich quality was required to better understand adversity-related experiences in the world's best athletes. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 Olympic gold medalists from a variety of sports. Inductive thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Results: The findings indicate that the participants encountered a range of sport- and non-sport adversities that they considered were essential for winning their gold medals, including repeated non-selection, significant sporting failure, serious injury, political unrest, and the death of a family member. The participants described the role that these experiences played in their psychological and performance development, specifically focusing on their resultant trauma, motivation, and learning. Conclusions: Adversity-related experiences were deemed to be vital in the psychological and performance development of Olympic champions. In the future, researchers should conduct more in-depth comparative studies of Olympic athletes’ adversity- and growth-related experiences, and draw on existing and alternative theoretical explanations of the growth-performance relationship. For professional practitioners, adversity-related experiences offer potential developmental opportunities if they are carefully and purposely harnessed.

Study 2: Over a decade of research attests to the importance of resilience in the workplace for employee well-being and performance. Yet, surprisingly, there has been no attempt to synthesize the evidence for the efficacy of resilience training in this context. The purpose of this study, therefore is to provide a systematic review of work-based resilience training interventions. Our review identified 14 studies that investigated the impact of resilience training on personal resilience and four broad categories of dependent variables: (1) mental health and subjective well-being outcomes, (2) psychosocial outcomes, (3) physical/biological outcomes, and (4) performance outcomes. Findings indicated that resilience training can improve personal resilience and is a useful means of developing mental health and subjective well-being in employees. We also found that resilience training has a number of wider benefits that include enhanced psychosocial functioning and improved performance. Due to the lack of coherence in design and implementation, we cannot draw any firm conclusions about the most effective content and format of resilience training. Therefore, going forward, it is vital that future research uses comparative designs to assess the utility of different training regimes, explores whether some people might benefit more/less from resilience training, and demonstrates consistency in terms of how resilience is defined, conceptualized, developed, and assessed. Practitioner points: Despite conceptual and theoretical support for resilience training, the empirical evidence is tentative, with the exception of a large effect for mental health and subjective well-being outcomes. Most programmes utilize a cognitive-behavioural approach to developing resilience .At this stage, there is no definitive evidence for the most effective training content or format, but it would appear wise to include an element of one-to-one training and support based on individual needs.

Links:

Author:

https://www.ntu.ac.uk/apps/staff_profiles/staff_directory/531b528a-8938-4bbb-a5d3-b14f5f494c8f-0/26/profile.aspx?deptcode=SST&deptTitle=School%20of%20Science%20and%20Technology&page=15

Papers:

http://www.jsams.org/article/S1440-2440(14)00121-2/abstract

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joop.12120/abstract

“Negative emotions can be useful, it’s just about how individuals go about reflecting on them.”

“Certain Situations that are inevitably going to happen in someone’s life, how do we get athlete’s to react better to them when they do happen.”