Adaptive performance in the work environment refers to adjusting to and understanding change in the workplace.Pulakos, E. D., Arad, S., Donovan, M. A., & Plamondon, K. E. (2000). Adaptability in the workplace: development of a taxonomy of adaptive performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(4), 612-624. An employee who is versatile is valued and important in the success of an organization. Employers seek employees with high adaptability, due to the positive outcomes that follow, such as excellent work performance, work attitude, and ability to handle stress.Leiz, Niessan, Swarowsky. "Age and adaptation to changes in the workplace". Journal of Managerial Psychology. 2009, p. 356-383. Employees, who display high adaptive performance in an organization, tend to have more advantages in career opportunities unlike employees who are not adaptable to change. In previous literature, Pulakos and colleagues established eight dimensions of adaptive performance.
Dimensions
Pulakos et al. proposed the following dimensions for adaptive performance: Handling emergencies and crisis situations: making quick decisions when faced with an emergency. Handling stress in the workforce: keeping composed and focused on task at hand when dealing with high demand tasks Creative problem solving: thinking outside the boundary limits, and innovatively to solve a problem. Dealing with uncertain and unpredictable work situations: able to become productive despite the occurrence of unknown situations. Learning and manipulating new technology, task, and procedures: approach new methods and technological constructs in order to accomplish a work task. Demonstrating interpersonal adaptability: being considerate of other people's points of view when working in a team to accomplish a certain goal. Demonstrating cultural adaptability: being respectful and considerate of different cultural backgrounds. Demonstrating physically oriented adaptability: physically adjusting one's self to better fit the surrounding environment.
Measurement Pulakos et al. developed a scale for adaptive performance based on their eight-dimension model. This scale, the Job Adaptability Inventory (JAI), contains 132 questions (15 – 18 questions per dimension). Another similar tool is the I-ADAPT measure (I-ADAPT-M) developed by Ployhart and Bliese,Ployhart, Robert E.; Bliese, Paul D. Burke, C. Shawn (Ed); Pierce, Linda G. (Ed); Salas, Eduardo (Ed), (2006). Understanding adaptability: A prerequisite for effective performance within complex environments. Advances in human performance and cognitive engineering research (Vol 6)., (pp. 3-39). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier, xi, 287 pp. based on their I-ADAPT theory. They focused on adaptability as a personality-like trait which describes individual's ability to adapt to organizational changes. Therefore, there is a difference between I-ADAPT-M and the JAI which measures adaptive performance as behaviors. The I-ADAPT-M also has eight dimensions (crisis adaptability, stress adaptability, creative adaptability, uncertain adaptability, learning adaptability, interpersonal adaptability, cultural adaptability, and physical adaptability), with 5 items for every dimension.
Predictors Several predictors of adaptive performance have been examined systematically, including cognitive abilities,Stasielowicz, L. (2020). How important is cognitive ability when adapting to changes? A meta-analysis of the performance adaptation literature. Personality and Individual Differences, 166. Big Five personality traits,Huang, J. L., Ryan, A. M., Zabel, K. L., & Palmer, A. (2014). Personality and adaptive performance at work: A meta-analytic investigation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(1), 162–79.Woo, S. E., Chernyshenko, O. S., Stark, S. E., & Conz, G. (2014). Validity of six openness facets in predicting work behaviors: A meta-analysis. Journal of Personality Assessment, 96(1), 76–86. and goal orientation.Stasielowicz, L. (2019). Goal orientation and performance adaptation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 82. According to the meta-analytic evidence, cognitive abilities promote adaptive performance. Cognitive abilities are particularly important when dealing with complex dynamic tasks. Other examined antecedences of adaptive performance seem to be less important than cognitive abilities. To illustrate, personality traits like Big Five are weakly related to adaptive performance. Only emotional stability and conscientiousness seem to be somewhat relevant. Motivational predictors have been examined too. However, goal orientation (e.g., learning goal orientation) is only relevant when predicting subjective (e.g., self-reported) adaptive performance. Thus, goal orientation is not useful when predicting objective adaptive performance (e.g., task outcomes).
Work stress Work stress has been considered as a major factor of many work outcomes, like performance, nonproductive behavior and turnover.Agolla, J., & Ongori, H. (2008). Occupational stress in organizations and its effects on organizational performance. Journal of Management Research, 8(3), 123-135.Rajkumar, S., & Swaminathan, R. (2013). Stress levels in organizations and their impact on employee's behavior. BVIMR Management Edge, 6(1), 79-88. An employee being able to adapt to change within an organization is more focused, and able to deal with stressful situations. An employee who is unable to [absolve their strain] is unable to focus on what is occurring in the organization, such as organizational change.Folkman, S., Lazarus, R. S., Dunkel-Schetter, C., DeLongis, A., & Gruen, R. J. (1986). Dynamics of a stressful encounter: cognitive appraisal, coping, and encounter outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(5), 992. Not only can work stress predict adaptive performance to a considerable extent, there are also a lot of overlaps between adaptive performance and stress coping.
Stress appraisal It has been long recognized that work stress generally has a negative effects on job performance,Motowidlo, S. J., Packard, J. S., & Manning, M. R. (1986). Occupational stress: its causes and consequences for job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71(4), 618. but there is differential influence resulting from different perceptions of stressors. When faced with a new situation, individuals would spontaneously begin to evaluate their own abilities and skills as compared with the requirements of the situation, which is referred to as stress appraisals. Such stress appraisal has two stages: primary appraisal and secondary appraisal. In the primary appraisal stage, individuals evaluate what potential threats there will be, concerning the demands from situation and the goals and values of themselves. In the secondary appraisal stage, individuals evaluate the resources they have to deal with those requirements. The results of appraisal, after two stages, are indicated to fall on a continuum between two extremes of being challenged and threatened.Blascovich, J., & Mendes, W.B. (2000). Challenge and threat appraisals: The role of affective cues. In J. Forgas (Ed.), Feeling and thinking: The role of affect in social cognition (pp. 59-82). New York: Cambridge University Press. Challenge appraisals mean that individuals feel their resources, like abilities and social support to be abundant sufficient to fulfill requirements of the situation. Threat appraisals, on the other hand, mean that individuals are not confident about their abilities or other resources to respond to the situation demands. Threat appraisals and challenge appraisals could influence job performance distinctively.Schneider, T. R. (2004). The role of neuroticism on psychological and psychological stress responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,40(6), 795-804. As for adaptive performance, the more challenging (i.e., the less threatening) one's stress appraisals are, the more adaptive performance he/she would have.Stokes, C. K., Schneider, T. R., & Lyons, J. B. (2008). Predicting Adaptive Performance in Multicultural Teams: a Causal Model. In NATO HFM Symposium on Adaptability in Team Coalitions, Copenhagen, Denmark. This relationship is mediated by self-efficacy, which is a belief about one's capacities for certain tasks. Challenging rather than threatening appraisals would lead to higher levels of self-efficacy, and thus benefit individuals' adaptive performance.
Stress coping Coping, as a form of response to stressors, describes how individuals handle stressful events. It is very close to one dimension of adaptive performance by definition (i.e., the Handling Work Stress dimension), and coping has been suggested to be another form of adaptation. However, they are still different constructions. Stress coping could be divided into several styles and strategies based on several theories. One general idea is to divide coping as active coping and avoidant coping.Aspinwall, L. G., & Taylor, S. E. (1997). A stitch in time: self-regulation and proactive coping. Psychological bulletin, 121(3), 417. Active coping means to proactively address and resolve stressful events, like quitting a stressful job and changing into a less overwhelming one. Avoidant coping means to reduce stress by ignoring it, like involving in problematic drinking. Another set of coping strategy types includes problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping.Carver, C. S., & Connor-Smith, J. (2010). Personality and coping. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 679-704. Problem-focused coping involves using skills and knowledge to deal with the cause of their problems. Emotion-focused coping involves releasing negative emotions by ways like distracting or disclaiming. Adaptive performance involves a mixture of different coping strategies. Because adaptive performance concerns positive aspects of behaviors, it is more closely related to coping strategies that have positive effects, such as active coping and problem-focused coping.Shields, N. (2001). Stress, active coping, and academic performance among persisting and nonpersisting college students. Journal of Applied Biobehavioral Research, 6(2), 65-81.Struthers, C. W., Perry, R. P., & Menec, V. H. (2000). An examination of the relationship among academic stress, coping, motivation, and performance in college. Research in higher education, 41(5), 581-592. Therefore, adaptive performance is more likely to contain such behaviors in stressful situations.
Team adaptive performance In addition to individual adaptive performance, psychologists are also interested in adaptive performance at team level. Team adaptive performance is defined as an emergent phenomenon that compiles over time from the unfolding of a recursive cycle whereby one or more team members use their resources to functionally change current cognitive or behavioral goal-directed action or structures to meet expected or unexpected demands. It is a multilevel phenomenon that emanates as team members and teams recursively display behavioral processes and draw on and update emergent cognitive states to engage in change. Team adaptive performance is considered as the core and proximal temporal antecedents to team adaptation, which could be seen as a change in team performance in response to a salient cue or cue stream that leads to a functional outcome for the entire team.Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Salas, E., Pierce, L., & Kendall, D. (2006). Understanding team adaptation: a conceptual analysis and model. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(6), 1189–207.