“Adaptive resilience in a post-pandemic era: A case of Vietnamese organizations”

The Covid-19 pandemic has been fading gradually, but another problematic phase has begun for organizations in the post-Covid-19 era in Vietnam. This study aims to examine the direct impact of transformational leadership on adaptive resilience, the indirect impact of transformational leadership on adaptive resilience via psychological and employee resilience, and the interactions between the levels of resilience. Quantitative research was used to analyze data from 324 employees chosen via convenient sampling in Vietnam. The findings indicated that transformational leadership directly impact adaptive resilience (β = 0.559, p < 0.000), psychological resilience (β = 0.361, p < 0.000), and employee resilience (β = 0.292, p < 0.000) and also indirectly impact adaptive resilience via psychological and employee resilience (β = 0.135, p < 0.000), and employee resilience via psychological resilience (β = 0.130, p < 0.000). Furthermore, there was also the direct influence of psychological resilience on adaptive resilience (β = 0.135, p < 0.005) and the indirect influence of psychological resilience on adaptive resilience via employee resilience (β = 0.073, p < 0.000). The other direct significant relations, such as between psychological resilience and employee resilience, and between employee resilience and adaptive resilience, were also confirmed (β = 0.360, p < 0.000; β = 0.204, p < 0.000).


INTRODUCTION
The Covid-19 pandemic has nearly been around for three years, posing difficulties and causing significant personal, financial, and societal losses. The pandemic's most notable effects on society and the economy included severe interruptions in health services, a shortage of funding for the protection of citizens, significant job losses, financial hardship for emerging nations, inflation, and diminished social cohesiveness and community resilience (United Nations, 2022).
One of the nations that the Covid-19 outbreak has significantly impacted is Vietnam. The majority of businesses, including service, tourism, transportation, catering, lodging, and entertainment industries, suffered significant harm due to the crisis, which disrupted trade and supply chains. It also had a significant impact on people's lives and psychological well-being. The majority of businesses, however, are currently engaged in an adaptive process (Phuc, 2021). The UN (2020) stated that methods to adapt and respond to the pandemic (i.e., protecting employment, helping small and medium-sized firms, social cohesion, and community-led resilience), which had been put into practice, resulted in notable resilient socio-economic indications in Vietnam. Vietnamese leaders should be able to adapt to changes in the post-pandemic environment. However, the quantity of academic works connected to resilience has not yet been exposed proportionally to both the meso and micro levels. Only a few research on resilience have been conducted in Vietnam (Ngoc Su 2022), resilient procedures depended on professional sectors, occupied positions, and the perceived severity of the problematic instances. What has transpired demonstrates that the Covid- 19 pandemic has not been a personal or regional emergency. This indicates that it has had an unprecedented global impact, affecting all organizations, industries, and people globally. However, there is still a lack of empirical data to provide a complete picture of the adaptive resilience of companies in many sectors during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in Vietnam.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES
Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate organizational resilience during a crisis. However, studies examining leadership's impact on adaptive resilience are rare, especially the role of transformational leadership in organizational adaptive resilience after a considerable crisis similar to the Covid-19 pandemic. Barasa et al. (2018, p. 491) noted that "Resilience was generally taken to mean a system's ability to continue to perform and meet its objectives in the face of challenges; furthermore, resilience is not just a system's capacity to withstand shocks, but also to adapt and transform." Luthans (2002) pinpointed that resilience is a positive capacity in organizational behavior. Kimhi (2016) indicated the three distinct levels of resilience (individual, community, and national), all of which were interconnected and dealt with the consequences of adversity.
Psychological resilience manifests that individuals can advance emotional endowments to better respond to adverse conditions (Williams et al., 2017). Employee resilience is also an important individual resource (Näswall et al., 2019). It is the behavioral capabilities of individuals to react better to adverse events (Kuntz et al., 2016;Williams et al., 2017). Employee resilience, however, differed from psychological resilience (Prayag, 2018). It is "the capacity of employees to utilize resources in order to continually adapt and flourish at work, even when faced with adversity" (Kuntz et al., 2016, p. 460

METHOD
Following the literature review, a quantitative research method was used to test the research model shown in Figure 1.  (Carless et al., 2000) measures transformational leadership with seven items. The GTL had satisfactory reliability (Cronbach's value of 0.93) to measure a single leadership construct. Consistently, the survey used Likert-type scales with responses from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

RESULTS
Descriptive statistics (Table 1) indicate that most females had responded to the survey (73.1%). A high proportion of respondents were aged below 30 years old (77.2%). The percentage of positions occupied as an employee was 89.5%. Nearly three-quarters of respondents had tenure between 1 and 5 years. Significantly, 64.5% of respondents have been working in private organizations, and these percentages in public and foreign organizations were 14.5% and 21%, respectively. Similarly, the proportion of respondents working in the education, manufacturing, and commercial business sectors is 23.8%, 19.8%, and 14.8%, respectively, and the others account for 41.6%. These characteristics of the sample are representative and meet the research objectives. The preliminary assessment was conducted by SPSS 22, including Cronbach's values to fulfill exploration factor analysis 1 (EFA1), which was to develop and refine scales (Reio & Shuck, 2015) and exploration factor analysis 2 (EFA2), which was to check common method bias (Podsakoff et al., 2003). Preliminary assessment results of the EmpRes with nine items had three excluded items (i.e., two items with corrected item-total correlation < 0.3 and one item with factor loading < 0.5). Besides, the BRT-13B consisted of seven items, and the GTL was five items through a varimax rotation. The EFA2 was undertaken on 24 representative items ( Table 2) of the study, with the results indicating that the single factor explained only 39.7% of the total variance, which is below the threshold of 50% (Podsakoff et al., 2003). Smart PLS4 was applied to assess the measurement and structural model proposed through the PLS algorithm and bootstrapping (5000 subsamples) (Hair et al., 2016). The reliability and validity scores of the constructs are revealed in Table  2. The value of Cronbach's Alpha and factor loadings for all constructs were higher than 0.7, exception for factor loadings of two items of adaptive resilience. However, all AVE values of the constructs were above the 0.50 threshold (from 0.576 to 0.715), and the CR of measures ranged from 0.891 to 0.937, thus not removing any of the items. Furthermore, the rho-a values also ranged from 0.853 to 0.921, so all constructs are internally consistent and fulfill the condition of convergent validity (Fornell & Larcker, 1981;Hair et al., 2016).
The discriminant validity was considered by comparing the square root of each AVE in the diagonal with the correlation coefficients (off-diagonal) for each construct in the relevant rows and columns. Table 3 indicated that the discriminant validity of constructs satisfied the conditions that all the inter-correlations between the constructs were lower than the square root of AVE. Besides, the values of HTMT ratios for all the constructs are below 0.9, implying no multicollinearity among the latent constructs. Table 3 shows that the highest value of the HTMT ratio did not embrace the 0.85 threshold (i.e., 0.762 is the highest), so the study's discriminant validity has been established (Fornell & Larcker, 1981;Henseler et al., 2015).
The R-square values showed that transformational leadership, psychological resilience, and employee resilience explained 54.8% of the variance in adaptive resilience. Transformational leadership and psychological resilience explained 29.1% of the variance in employee resilience, while transformational leadership explained 13.1% of the variance in psychological resilience. The path coefficients in Table 4 showed that psychological resilience has a significant and positive relationship with employee resilience (H4, β = 0.360, p < 0.000) and adaptive resilience (H5, β = 0.135, p < 0.005).
The f2 values indicated the contribution of predictor variables toward dependent variables. All effect sizes (f2) were positive. Transformational leadership (f2 = 0.544) has the largest effect size on adaptive resilience. Transformational leadership has a medium effect (f2 = 0.150) on predicting psychological resilience, and psychological resilience has a medium effect (f2 = 0.159) on employee resilience. The others were small (0.02 < f2 < 0.15) (Cohen, 2013).

DISCUSSION
This study was done to determine how transformational leadership affects psychological, employee, and adaptive resilience; how psychological re-silience affects employee and adaptive resilience; and how employee resilience affects adaptive resilience.
The results of the investigation confirmed the five different significant impacts on adaptive resilience. This is different from previous studies, which only investigated the impact of each separate item on organizational resilience. The resilience of organizations in the post-Covit-19 context is not only the role of transformational leadership but also psychological resilience and job stability as employee resilience, which is consistent with reality. Research results stress the critical role of leadership in organizational resilience, especially adaptive resilience in the post-pandemic context. However, the number of previous studies on the impact of transformational leadership, psychological resilience, and employee resilience on organizational resilience could be higher.

CONCLUSION
This study had given evidence about the effects of transformational leadership on psychological resilience, employee resilie and adaptive resilience of organizations; simultaneously, it confirmed the interation of the resiliene levels in a post-pandemic era in Vietnamese organizations. The study also clarified the theoretical background of organizational adaption resilience. Findings of the study demonstrated the direct and indirect relationships, degree of influences, and impacting trends of the effects of transformational leadership on adaptive resilience, transformational leadership on employee resilience, and psychological resilience on adaptive resilience. Besides, the direct relationships of transformational leadership on psychological resilience, psychological resilience on employee resilience and employee resilience on adaptive resilience were confirmed with degree of impacts, relevant directions.
The study's findings align with the findings of earlier research. However, the discovery that psychological resilience (as a mediator) is responsible for the association between transformational leadership and employee resilience has demonstrated why this study is unique as previous research ignored the mediation function of psychological resilience.
Future research must be attentive in looking for other mediators and moderators of analyzed relationships. Future studies should also focus on the impact of various leadership philosophies on organizational resilience. The findings support this study's essential contribution to research and practice.