STUDY PROTOCOL article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1514954
Psychological resilience training for leaders in extreme times: Study protocol of a randomized controlled trial
Provisionally accepted
- 1Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
- 2University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
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The fact that organizations face increasing complexity, crises and adverse events requires corporate leaders to respond rapidly and continuously while maintaining their wellbeing and high performance. Psychological resilience is crucial for navigating in extreme times. However, research on building resilience in leader contexts is scarce, particularly regarding how leaders learn to anticipate, cope with, and learn from crises and adversities. This protocol describes a randomized controlled study that examines the dynamics and impact of resilience training focusing both on self-leadership development (psychological resilience) for leading oneself and on leadership development for leading others (psychosocial resilience). Participants include formal leaders and key personnel responsible for leading organizational functions or units. The intervention group will receive resilience training, while the control group will be offered modified training post-intervention. The flexible intervention, grounded in applied positive psychology and cognitive interventions, will be longitudinal, incorporating experiential learning, and involving Human Management Resource (HRM) and educated Human Resource (HR) resilience trainers. Leaders will participate in 20 weekly and collective "resilience-sprints" during extreme times. Primary outcomes will be measured at three time points: before, during, and after the intervention to evaluate effects and explore resilience pathways. Continuous evaluations will identify the relevance of implemented resilience factors, and process evaluations will provide insights into contextual influences and dynamics of resilience building. The study integrates individual and organizational factors into a psychosocial resilience intervention designed as a comprehensive leader training program. The study protocol directs a study that aims to enhance empirical understanding of building leader resilience in extreme times of crisis and adversities, to benefit research in Management, HRM, and resilience fields. Ultimately, the study
Keywords: Psychological resilience1, Leaders' resilience2, Leader resilience3, Leadership development4, Building resilience5, Resilience training6, Psychosocial resilience training7
Received: 21 Oct 2024; Accepted: 06 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hersom, Knoop and Justesen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Christina Hersom, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
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