Contemporary workplaces are characterised by disruption, complexity, and sustained performance demands that create risks to employee wellbeing. Understanding how individuals and teams maintain psychological health and performance under these conditions remains a central challenge for organisations. This symposium presents four studies examining resilience and thriving at work through a multi-level lens spanning individual metacognition, leadership, team dynamics, and organisational systems.

The session begins with the introduction of the 5 R’s Multi-systems Framework for Resilience Interventions in Organisations, which conceptualises resilience as a dynamic system-level process emerging from interactions between individuals, teams, and organisational design. Drawing on resilience scholarship, the framework outlines five coordinated processes: Response, Recovery, Reflect, Refine, and Resource through which organisations can support resilience in employees and teams. Across these processes, intra-individual mechanisms (e.g., cognitive processes) interact with system-level factors (e.g., job design) to support adaptive functioning during adversity.

Building on this foundation, the second presentation examines structured self-reflection as an intervention for strengthening resilient beliefs that support coping. Grounded in the Systematic Self-Reflection model of resilience strengthening (Crane et al., 2019; Crane, Boga et al., 2019), the study demonstrates how guided reflection on stressful experiences can strengthen adaptive beliefs such as coping self-efficacy, which serve as cognitive resources supporting resilient functioning (Bandura, 1986; Gallagher et al., 2020). Findings indicate that structured reflective writing supports resilience development through the encouragement of resilient beliefs.

The third presentation uses Event Systems Theory (Morgeson et al., 2015) to examine how disruptive workplace contexts shape the dynamic influence of leadership on employee wellbeing. Leadership behaviours that prioritise employee health and recovery during novel and disruptive workplace events can function as job resources that buffer the effects of highly demanding conditions on wellbeing (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007; Franke et al., 2014). This session presents findings of a two-wave repeated measures study investigating whether the perceived strength of disruptive workplace events modifies how leadership influences follower wellbeing over time through self-regulatory processes.

The fourth presentation examines interpersonal emotion regulation within teams, investigating how attempts by team members to influence one another’s emotional responses shape relational dynamics in demanding team environments (Niven et al., 2025). These interpersonal processes represent a mechanism through which teams maintain cohesion and resilience when facing challenging demands. Drawing on longitudinal data, findings indicate that interpersonal emotion regulation strengthens team identification and team trust over time. In turn, these relational mechanisms transmit the effect of interpersonal emotion regulation on team resilience.