A Process Perspective on Adaptive Performance: Research Insights and New Directions

Given its acceptance and value as an important facet of workplace behavior, research has primarily attempted to understand adaptive performance by way of examining its antecedents. Although useful, these findings provide little insight into the in-situ, intra-individual processes that occur during adaptive performance (i.e., How do people adapt to change? What determines the speed at which people adapt? How do failures to adapt occur?). The current paper develops and presents a process model of adaptation in order to provide a framework for organizing, understanding, and investigating the in-situ process involved when individuals adapt to changes in job demands. In particular, we suggest that in order to successfully adapt to a changing task environment, individuals must go through a series of processes in order to detect the nature of a change, diagnose its cause, develop or refine strategies, learn additional knowledge or skills, and enact appropriate performance behaviors. At the same time, dynamic emotional, cognitive, motivational, and situational factors serve as proximal inputs and outputs of these processes. In doing so, they shape the success and speed with which people adapt and suggest a broadened set of outcomes of adaptive performance. We describe how this model can be leveraged to stimulate dynamic adaptive performance research and to promote adaptive performance in applied settings.