Exploring Adaptive Performance

Current workplace is often highlighted by job positions where adaptive performance (AP) is decisive for employees to achieve success in the event of dynamic and ever-changing task demands. This acknowledgement has caused growing interest in adaptive performance as a dimension of organizational performance. This brief study presents a review of research studies regarding the evolution and development of adaptive performance in the past decade. In attempting so, we have tried to combine the existing knowledge base of adaptive performance, and provide suggestions for future research areas.

Introduction

The concept of adaptive performance is defined in general terms as an individual’s ability to adapt to dynamic work situations (Hesketh & Neal, 1999). Pulakos et al. (2000) were the first to propose a universal model of adaptive performance. As a first step, they reviewed research on individual performance and adaptability to changes. Then they identified and inspected 1,000 critical incidents (representative of new workplace scenarios requiring a behavioral adaptation or change on the part of respondents) including 24 jobs in the army. Finally, they proposed eight dimensions of adaptive performance, including: dealing with uncertain or unpredictable work situations; handling emergencies or crisis situations; solving problems creatively; handling work stress; learning new tasks, technologies and procedures; demonstrating interpersonal adaptability; demonstrating cultural adaptability; and demonstrating physically oriented adaptability.

The importance of worker’s ability to adapt to different situations in the workplace and perform at a better level has become a pivotal matter to focus on now more than ever for the organizations. New changes and developments in technologies results in a dynamic work design to which workers must quickly learn to adapt.

Interconnected global economies demands constant change and needs adaptation (e.g., new skill development training or expatriation in foreign countries, meeting customers of different cultural backgrounds). Structural business changes such as mergers and acquisitions require that workers must adjust to new environments (e.g., designation, job description, company culture and values). Thus, adaptation plays a decisive role in the success of employees and in turn, organizations.

Emphasizing on the importance of adaptive performance, and its implications on development of organizations, this asks for a review to present a research roadmap of adaptive performance and the guidelines to take this research area forward. In response to this, the present study intends to review adaptive performance research in the existing literature.

The value of this systematic review lies in the fact that it provides an understanding of the current state of adaptive performance research on a single platform through various classification schemes with respect to the distribution of published articles across different countries, contexts and time periods; reports various common research limitations of studies conducted on adaptive performance; presents a set of theoretical perspectives through which adaptive performance has been explored so far, and summarizes few important issues that future research should explore.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: first, the description of research methodology used is discussed. Second, the research findings in terms of the distribution of articles on various criteria such as country of research, year of publication, type of study, theoretical background on which the study is conducted, and some common research gaps identified is presented. Finally, the paper discusses the potential scope for future research and implications of this study.

Research Methodology

The primary objectives of this fundamental review are: first, to present the current state of Adaptive performance research. Second, to explicitly abridge a couple of unexploited territories that future researchers should focus on Adaptive performance. To accomplish these goals, a dominant academic database Scopus, was explored to identify articles and reviews on customer engagement. This paper reviews literature spanning from 2008 to 2018. Articles were identified in the “article title” section of the said databases using the keyword as “Adaptive performance”. To keep the search process specific to the objectives of this study, the search was under the subject limits of “Business, management and accounting” and “psychology” and containing the exact keyword “Adaptive performance”.

As shown in Table I, a total of 138 articles were identified through the selected search criteria, of which only 13 studies survived to be taken for final analysis.

A trend that needs attention is that up to the year 2015, the studies on adaptive performance where focused on fundamental aspects such as measuring adaptive performance in individual and team levels, establishing relationship between task performance, leadership and strain and adaptive performance. But afterwards, studies started focusing on specific cultural and religious contexts such as Zhong yong thinking, Islamic work ethic and personality traits such as emotional intelligence, extraversion etc.

This shift from the fundamental studies to the context-specific studies may be due to the attention given on the importance of adaptive performance is recognized widely and spread to developing countries with different cultures and religious contexts and other industries. All the 13 articles were divided into two time periods where approximately equal number of research articles has been produced. This division was done to identify the shift in pattern of adaptive performance studies over the last decade.

• Period I: 2008-2014 (Seven years); and
• Period II: 2015-2018 (Four years)

The time period I mainly comprises of two foundational articles; one multilevel investigation of adaptive performance in team and individual level relationship by Han, T. Y., and Williams, K. J. (2008) that conferred that team adaptive performance (TAP) can be represented as the sum or aggregate of Individual adaptive performance (IAP), the second was a meta-analytic investigation between personality and adaptive performance at workplace by Huang, J. L et al., which found that personality traits such as ambition, adjustment, and emotional stability all were predictors of adaptive performance. There other articles discussed about the relationship between adaptive performance and transformational leadership, task performance and development of scale to measure individual adaptive performance in organizations.

The time period II saw the emergence of a conceptual study on adaptive performance literature, a review on individual adaptive performance (Jundt, D. K et al.; 2014). This phase also represents the development of certain context-specific adaptive performance studies such as a self-Regulation Model of Zhong Yong Thinking and Employee Adaptive Performance (Pan, W., & Sun, L. Y. (2018), a study on Islamic work ethic, innovative work behaviour, and adaptive performance (Javed, B.et al.;2017) and a study examining the role of emotional intelligence between organizational learning and adaptive performance (Pradhan, R. K. et al.; 2017) which further improved the empirical studies of customer engagement.

Analysis and results

This section begins by describing the year-wise, country-wise, and study orientation (empirical or conceptual) wise distribution of the 13 identified articles. The section then describes the theoretical background on which these studies of adaptive performance were conducted and some of the common research gaps identified in these studies.

Year-wise distribution of articles with respect to the study orientation (conceptual or empirical)

Before 2015, the term cultural adaptation was used by only a single article, implying the lesser number of researches on context specific adaptive performance studies. On the basis of the selection criteria of the articles (as mentioned in the research methodology section), the first published study about adaptive performance under the selection criteria was found in 2008 and was, therefore, taken as the starting year for our analysis. Based on the study orientation (conceptual or empirical), it was found that the articles till 2014 were all empirical in nature with one study (Charbonnier‐Voirin, A., & Roussel, P., 2012) used both qualitative and quantitative measures to carry out the research. Thus the time Period I only produced empirical studies about adaptive performance in the subject area. But after 2014, one conceptual study review (Jundt, D. K, 2015) was published about individual adaptive performance in organizations. The attention was always more towards the quantitative empirical exploration of the adaptive performance in the industry.

Country-wise distribution of articles in different time periods

To identify the frequency and distribution of research on adaptive performance across the globe, a country-wise classification of literature is considered important. This study found that the 13 identified articles on adaptive performance have come from 9 countries with most of the articles from developed countries such as the USA (3), and European countries like France (2) and Germany (2) as shown in Table. In response to the growing importance of adaptive performance, research in this domain has started extending across developing countries in the recent few years. A stark contrast in the country wise distribution can be found if we consider the two time periods we have selected for the review. While the time period I has articles mostly from developed countries and Europe, time period II has articles from developing countries in Asia such as India, Pakistan, and African countries such as Nigeria as well.

Theoretical perspectives used to explore adaptive performance

Several theories have been used in the extant literature to study adaptive performance.

This review found that 13 studies were built using any of the 10 theoretical perspectives that are presented in Table VI. Rest of the 3 studies did not mention any specific theory adopted to study adaptive performance. Multilevel theory was used in the study for the investigation of adaptive performance in individual and team level by Han, T. Y., and Williams, K. J. (2008) and for measurement of adaptive performance in individual and teams by Marques-Quinteiro, P et al.;

Another group of socio-analytic personality theories namely, Trait activation theory, socio-analytic theory were used in the study of adaptive performance at work (Wihler, A., Meurs, J. A., Wiesmann, D., Troll, L., & Blickle, G. (2017)) and self-determination (SDT) theory was also used were Training, Job Autonomy and Career Planning as predictors to study adaptive performance (Tabiu, A., Pangil, F., & Othman, S. Z. (2018)).

Research limitations

By preparing the distribution schema of adaptive performance articles based on different criteria and, this study is a brief reference for researchers to understand the current scenario of adaptive performance research in the Human resource discipline and proposes new areas for future research. This study acknowledges its limitations with respect to its brief and exclusive search criteria, which might affect its generality.

Discussion and future research

This brief and exclusive review provides different contributions for researchers. First, the study provides a systematic review of 13 identified articles in the human resource discipline to show how researchers have studied this concept so far and presents new avenues for future research. Second, a discussion regarding the evolution and significance of adaptive performance has been outlined. Third, to understand how scholars have examined the concept of adaptive performance so far, a collection of theories adopted by researchers are identified and organized in tabular format for reference of existing research findings. Fourth, by providing the distribution schema adaptive performance articles based on exclusive search criteria, this brief study is believed to serve as a decent reference for researchers to understand the current scenario of adaptive performance research in the Human resource discipline and help in future research developments. Lastly, the review shows various research limitations in the existing literature on adaptive performance that future research should focus on. Table VIII summarizes the major research gaps identified from the existing adaptive performance literature.

This study concludes that the concept of adaptive performance is a research area that needs more focus due to its rising significance in the industry. Based on the evolution of adaptive performance, particularly in the last six years, this study expects that further research will be conducted in this area and more papers, reviews and results will be produced in the near future. To summarize, this study makes a brief yet important contribution by providing a summary that can help readers understand the state of adaptive performance research done so far and aid researchers identify areas for future research