Unpacking the relationship between resilience and work engagement: The role of emotional inertia

Abstract

This study explores the role of affect dynamics in the relationship between resilience and work engagement. Previous resilience research has mainly focused on mean affect levels rather than fluctuating affective states over time. We address this by examining emotional inertia, a feature of affect dynamics that refers to an individual's tendency to carryover affective experiences from one moment to the next and operationalized as the degree to which deviations from mean affect persist. We investigate whether emotional inertia mediates between resilience and work engagement, beyond mean levels of affect. Additionally, as resilience is seen as most relevant in adverse conditions, we explore the moderating role of perceived stress. Data were collected from 171 employees completing affect surveys up to five times a day over 5 days, yielding a total of 3895 observations. As expected, resilience related negatively to emotional inertia and had a significant indirect effect on work engagement through inertia. The relationship of resilience with emotional inertia and the indirect effect on engagement were only significant when stress was higher. Our findings contribute to the literature by showing how resilience supports work engagement through facilitating recovery from affective fluctuations and offer research insights for creating an engaged workforce.