Adaptive Performance: A Review of Managerial Interventions

Introduction

COVID-19 has created an urgent need for organisations to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances under conditions of great uncertainty. These disruptions have affected organisations’ long-term plans, their business models, the size and composition of their workforce, and employees’ everyday working conditions. The ability to lead and implement change in such circumstances has never been more important. However, due to the ongoing unpredictable challenges posed by the disruptions, a tightly planned approach is less feasible. Based on the need to make continuous change, we conduct a review of proposed managerial interventions for supporting employee adaptive performance.

Adaptive performance refers to employees’ capabilities to adapt to rapidly changing work situations (Neal & Hesketh, 1999), and it is thought to include dimensions of problem solving, dealing with uncertainty, learning new tasks and procedures, and interpersonal, cultural and physical adaptability (Pulakos et al., 2000). Adaptive performance has been distinguished from task proficiency and proactivity (Griffin et al., 2007), with the former describing behaviours that are not formalised nor embedded within a social context, and the latter with anticipatory, self-directed behaviours intended to achieve desired outcomes.

We argue that a focus on encouraging employee adaptive performance is likely to complement and enhance managerial change efforts. While prominent change management theories have provided important insights into how to lead change effectively (Beer & Nohria, 2000; Bridges, 2009; Goldratt, 1999; Kotter, 1996), they have traditionally emphasised a planned approach in which change is characterised as episodic, with a clear beginning, middle and end (Bouckenooghe, 2010). Such approaches have arguably been well-suited to dealing with the initial COVID-19 outbreak. The outbreak presents a clearly defined problem with profound negative consequences (a “burning platform”) if the organization fails to act quickly and decisively. However, the COVID-19 situation does not offer a clearly defined endpoint, making these models less suitable for managing an uncertain future. Even with the development of several promising vaccines, it is unlikely that the economic climate and workplace culture will snap back to “normal”. Alternatively, if treatments turn out to lack long-term effectiveness or a new vaccine-resistant strain of coronavirus emerges, organisations will need to make significant changes to adapt to this new, permanent situation. Hence, the COVID situation requires both leadership capable of managing ongoing changes, and employees prepared to embrace a state of continuous organisational change.

Managing ongoing change requires a different approach to episodic change. For episodic change, Weick and Quinn (1999) theorise a leader’s role is to initiate and drive changes with employees who are often resistant to that change. In contrast, when managing continuous change, a leader’s role may be described as that of a “sense maker” (Weick & Quinn, 1999, p. 366), where leaders help reframe opinions that employees may already hold, rather than imposing their own planned agenda on their team. If the COVID situation continues to evolve as a continuous, relatively unpredictable series of changes, such a perspective suggests that it may be incumbent on leaders to take on a notably different role in managing change than that propagated by prominent traditional theorists (Beer & Nohria, 2000; Bridges, 2009; Goldratt, 1999; Kotter, 1996).

From an employee perspective, embracing continuous organisational change may require adaptation to a variety of new stressors, along with a concurrent need to abandon established methods. A context of continuous change may require adoption of new roles or responsibilities, abandonment of important past accountabilities, major changes to an employee’s day-to-day working schedule, and layoffs of colleagues. In such an environment, an employee’s general attitude toward change may be more relevant than any specific attitude held towards any one component they are required to adapt to.