Keeping Positive and Building Strength

During an organizational crisis in health care, we collected multilevel data from 426 team members and 52 leaders. The results of hierarchical linear modeling describe the influence of leader behavior on team members’ resilience, which is primarily through affective mechanisms. Specifically, transformational leadership was associated with greater levels of positive affect and lower levels of negative affect, which in turn predicted higher resilience among team members. Inverse effects were found for the passive form of management-by-exception (MBE) leadership. Contrary to expectation, no relationship was found between active MBE leadership and affect. The implications for leaders and team members to foster positive affect and resilience during a crisis are discussed.