“She takes rest as seriously as working:”  How resilient professional caregivers think about and practice rest

Rush, Katherine Ann

“She takes rest as seriously as working:” How resilient professional caregivers think about and practice rest

dc.contributor.advisor	Bisel, Ryan
dc.contributor.author	Rush, Katherine Ann
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Johnson, Amy
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Connelly, Shane
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Wong, Norman
dc.date.accessioned	2023-03-23T19:00:02Z
dc.date.available	2023-03-23T19:00:02Z
dc.date.issued	2023-05-12
dc.date.manuscript	2023-03-09
dc.description.abstract	Do resilient employees need less rest? This study explored that question by investigating how resilient professional caregivers think about and practice rest. Analysis revealed that highly communicatively resilient professional caregivers acknowledged the material reality of the body, labeled here bounded physicality. Bounded physicality is the limited ability to engage physically in space and time. A sample of highly communicatively resilient professional caregivers was collected using atypical survey-based case selection and standard deviation analysis. Eleven positively deviant (PD) caregivers and five corroborators were subsequently interviewed about their meanings and practices of rest. Additionally, five professionals who scored extremely low on the communicative resilience measure and four who were average were also interviewed as a validation effort. Constant comparative analysis of participants’ interview responses (N = 25) revealed that PD caregivers constructed rest as the proactive pursuit of holistic restoration and held a multifaceted interpretive schema of rest. Namely, they viewed rest as a (a) strategic defense and (b) normal indispensable joy, and practiced rest as (c) multimodal care. Additionally, they resisted the ideal worker norm (IWN) by protecting, prioritizing, and pursuing rest. Finally, PD caregivers experienced positive consequences of rest on their personal, relational, and professional wellbeing. As anticipated, these findings contrasted with non-PD caregivers’ interview responses. Taken together, this scholarship extends organizational communication theory, including literatures on positive organizational scholarship, the communicative theory of resilience, the ideal worker norm, and meanings of work (MOW) and rest. Ultimately, highly communicatively resilient professional caregivers build crucial reserves through rest, which challenges the view that resilient employees need less rest.	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	https://shareok.org/handle/11244/337150
dc.language	en_US	en_US
dc.subject	meanings of rest	en_US
dc.subject	communicative theory of resilience	en_US
dc.subject	caregivers	en_US
dc.subject	positive deviance	en_US
dc.thesis.degree	Ph.D.	en_US
dc.title	“She takes rest as seriously as working:” How resilient professional caregivers think about and practice rest	en_US
ou.group	Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences::Department of Communication	en_US
shareok.nativefileaccess	restricted	en_US
shareok.orcid	0000-0001-5893-2917	en_US