Abstract: Employee resilience is an indispensable psychological ability of employees to cope with negative events such as setbacks and conflicts, and is of great significance for organizations to cope with the impact of external environment. In the face of a competitive and uncertain environment, employees need to have a certain degree of resilience to effectively cope with setbacks and challenges, and achieve work adaptation and long-term development. Spiritual force is an invisible force that endow individual vitality and life, which helps to awaken individual positive emotions, supplement psychological resources, and promote the formation of employee resilience. Based on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and the conservation of resources theory, this paper constructs a moderated chain mediation model with positive emotion and thriving at work as mediating variables and strategic flexibility as the moderating variable. Experimental method and questionnaire method are used to cross-verify the theoretical model, and all hypotheses are verified. The results show that workplace spirituality can significantly improve employee resilience; Employees’ positive emotion and thriving at work not only play a mediating role in the process of workplace spirituality affecting employee resilience, but also exhibit a chain mediation effect, that is, workplace spirituality can further build lasting psychological resources (thriving at work) by awakening employees’ positive emotions, and ultimately strengthen employees’ resilience. Finally, strategic flexibility positively moderates the relationship between positive emotion and employee resilience, the relationship between thriving at work and employee resilience, and the chain mediating effect of positive emotion and thriving at work on workplace spirituality and employee resilience. That is, the stronger the strategic flexibility, the stronger the “emotion-resource” chain mediating effect of workplace spirituality on employee resilience. This paper explores the transmission mechanism of how workplace spirituality empowers employee resilience and the relevant boundary conditions, and provides management suggestions for enterprises to effectively develop or enhance employee resilience.

Key words: workplace spirituality, employee resilience, positive emotion, thriving at work, strategic flexibility