The Relationship between Civil Pilots' Resilience, Psychological Well-being and Work Performance

Resilience refers to individual's extant thinking process and behavior of choice which may protect the individual from suffering of robust stress or tragic events and smoothly get back to his/her life tracks. Resilience, thus, may be regarded as coping skills that the individual being equipped with in work organizations to improve his/her work performances from an occupational psychology perspective. That is, resilience may be defined, in part, as developing a constellation of traits to do individual's job well. For employees in high-stress and-risk aviation industry, it is of specialty crucial to assess the relationship between their resilience (i.e., stress coping skills), psychological well-being, and work performance. As such, individualized resilience-boosting program may be developed per the thorough understanding of this relationship. In the present study, 191 civil pilots were invited to participate in our questionnaire-filling survey. Based on factor analysis methods, six top-ranking factors encompassing 1) inner strength resource, 2) inner positive energy, 3) inspired growth, 4) solution by help, 5) interpersonal resource, and 6) spiritual religion were obtained for constructing our resilience scale. A total of three factors, including 1) work engagement, 2) promotion, and 3) good-teams, were used for establishing our work performance scale. Likewise, five factors consisting of 1) positive emotions, 2) commitment, 3) good relationships, 4) life meaning, and 5) achievement were employed to serve as our psychological well-being scale. The reliability tests revealed by Cronbach's alpha for the resilience, the psychological well-being, and the work performance scales ranged from.93 to.73. Using the correlation analysis methods, participants' resilience scores were positively associated with their psychological well-being (r=.85, p<.001), and work performance (r=.71, p<.001) scores. Moreover, each factor (aspect) of the resilience was correlated with each factor (aspect) in the psychological well-being and work performance scale in a positive manner (all ps<.001). Furthermore, pilots' age seems to affect their two aspects, inner positive energy and spiritual religion, of resilience with paradoxical increments of these two factor scores in the eldest (age 60) group. Surprisingly, pilots with college degree had greater scores in inner positive energy and inspired growth of resilience as compared to pilots with advanced degree. Self-motivated ab initio group had greatest solution by help scores, while military ab initio group exhibited greatest spiritual religion scores in the three groups of ab initio training backgrounds. These results, taken together, prompt us to draw a tentative conclusion that our resilience scale may serve as a sensitive and reliable tool for not only providing civil aviators a convenient self-appraisal battery but concomitantly suggesting his/her mental health and well-being.