Group resilience in incidents of varying degrees of danger and frequency

Abstract

Group resilience is the competency of a group to recover from an accident and maintain its activity. It is captured by the sequence of behaviors of its members. In this study, group resilience was defined in terms of four key abilities, namely the ability to prevent undesirable incidents from happening, to keep undesirable incidents from worsening, to recover from an accident after it has already occurred, and to maintain group activity levels. The present study aimed at exploring whether these four abilities were exerted differently according to incidents of varying degrees of danger and frequency. The results of the study showed that moderately dangerous incidents occurring frequently were rarely remained unsolved. Ability to prevent undesirable incidents from happening and ability to keep undesirable incidents from worsening were also shown to be instrumental in solutions for less dangerous incidents that sometimes occurred, though such incidents were hardly ever settled by the group’s ability to maintain its levels of activity. Frequent incidents that were a little dangerous were not settled by ability to prevent undesirable incidents. The ability to prevent undesirable incidents from occurring was not effective in such incidents. Furthermore, the study found that if group members did not have prior experience handling rare incidents that were dangerous, group resilience might not be exerted on such circumstances.