Promoting

Professional
Resilience
Sokhivah, M.Si

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Promoting Professional Resilience

Supervision can provide some protection against the corrosive

effects of exposure to demanding, stressful work and the impact
of working closely with service users who have traumatic stories
and are distressed by emotional, psychological and physical
experiences (Mor Barak et al. 2009).

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The Stress System

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The Stress System

Stress factors can emerge from all aspects of the stress system, starting with
the personal life of the practitioner, including their health, personal and
family relationships and obligation, social and cultural dimensions, practice
strengths and challenges. All these factors collide with the demands of
practice in professional life

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A Systemic Perspective on Stressors in Health And
Social Care

Brown and Bourne took a systems approach to stress in social work that has
utility across professions. Their model identified stressors at the following
points: the practitioner’s personal life, their current and past practice and the
intersection of this with previous stressful or traumatic events, the team and
agency context

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 Stress factors in the practitioner’s personal life, for example:

 Relationship difficulties

 Health

 Addictions
1. Personal  Loss or bereavement

 Financial difficulties

 Familial responsibilities

 Personal history of abuse or difficulties

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  Refer to Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs)

Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) provide counselling and

consulting services that focus on the prevention and/or
remediation of personal problems experienced by employees,
Systems or members of their families. EAPs are currently considered
Interventions in one of the main vehicles for occupational stress management
Personal Life : and are rapidly evolving into providers of holistic wellbeing
programs in the workplace.

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 Stress factors arising from the practice:

 Overly high proportion of high complexity ‘cases’

 Abuse and/or violence in the field or clinical setting

 Racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, cultural

2. Practice
 Stereotyping being the subject of threats and vexatious
complaints

 Large caseloads, high proportion of difficulty

 High-profile cases where risk assessment is a major factor

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  Refer to Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs)

Systems  Personal counselling or

Interventions in  Treatment Supervision
Practice :
 Links to appraisal

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 Stress factors emanating from the practitioner’s team
situation:

 Status and power issues and dysfunctional teams

 Personal conflicts
3. Workplace  Bullying and/or harassment

 Frontline staff feel undervalued

 Involvement with other colleagues’ work stress

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  Team meetings Negotiation and
Systems
Interventions in  Transparent mechanisms to allocate work
Workplace:

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 Stress factors arising in employment:

restructuring and redundancies

competitive environment, contracting and funding

uncertainties interprofessional conflict

4. Agency
poor physical working condition

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 Supervision and support for personal professional
Systems development Team and agency meeting – open
interventions in communication
Agency :

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 Stressors emanating from the social environment:

 Attitudes towards illness (physical and mental) and social

distres

 Attitudes towards service users

5. Community  Public ambivalence about intervention

 Care and control contradictions

 Unrealistic expectations

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 Regular focused meetings Clear expectations of staff
Systems relationships with other practitioners and developing
Interventions in partnerships
Community :

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 Stressors emanating from the sociopolitical environment:

 Low tolerance of mistakes and the crisis of trust

 The political nature of public services

6. Sociopolitical
 Audit culture
Environment
 Media interest in exposing professional fallibility

 For some professions, low status and poor public

understanding of the professional role

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Systems  Communication from ‘the bottom up’ to organisational
interventions in hierarchy,
Sociopolitical  Professional action through membership of professional and
Environment :
 Community advocacy groups

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Psychological Capital
Yousef and Avolio

the phrase ‘psychological capital’, which is ‘an individual’s positive psychological state of
development and is characterized by:

(1) having confidence (self-efficacy) to take on and put in the necessary effort to succeed at
challenging tasks;

(2) making a positive attribution (optimism) about succeeding now and in the future;

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Cont
(3) persevering toward goals and, when necessary, redirecting paths to goals (hope) in order to
succeed; and

(4) when beset by problems and adversity, sustaining and bouncing back and even beyond
(resilience) to attain success’

Research on the linked constructs of ‘hope, resilience, optimism, and efficacy supports that they
are developable’

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Feudtner et al. (2007, p.187) draw on Snyder (2000) in delineating three main components of
hope:

‘first, individuals who are able to anchor their thinking about the future to specific desired goals
are more likely to be hopeful.

‘Second, people who can imagine or plan ways to achieve these goals (step by step…) have greater
hope.

‘Third, individuals who think that they themselves as capable of pursuing goals successfully, who
believe in their own capacity to get what they want, are more hopeful’.

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Reference
 Allyson Davys and Liz Beddoe, Best practice in professional supervision : a guide for the helping
professions, 2010

 Andrea Kirk-Brown, Employee assistance programs: A review of the management of stress and
wellbeing through workplace counselling and consulting, July 2003, Australian
Psychologist 38(2):138-143

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