Conservation of Resources (CoR) theory proposes that people seek to acquire, protect and replenish resources they value, and experience stress when those resources are threatened, lost, or cannot be restored.
Resources include more than material assets. They can include time, energy, attention, knowledge, relationships, autonomy, confidence, status and access to support. Resource loss is particularly important because losses can accumulate: diminished resources reduce a person’s capacity to protect what remains or recover what has already been lost.
In organisations, this helps explain why sustained workload, uncertainty, poor relationships, repeated change and lack of recovery can progressively diminish human capability. What appears to be resistance, disengagement or declining performance may instead reflect people conserving increasingly scarce cognitive, emotional and social resources.
Adaptive capacity depends not simply on possessing resources, but on maintaining the capacity to replenish them.