Employee Adaptive Performance and Its Antecedents: Review and Synthesis

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to critically review current studies on employees’ adaptive performance and to integrate the findings to provide insights on how to develop employees’ adaptability. It also aims to identify gaps in the research to guide future studies on adaptive performance in the field of human resource development. By reviewing 34 empirical studies on adaptive performance published between 1999 and 2016, we identified 22 antecedents of adaptive performance at the individual (nine), job (six), group (three), and organizational (four) levels. Our analyses reveal that a significant amount of research has focused more on individual characteristics than on other aspects affecting employees’ high adaptive performance. Discussion, implications, and recommendations for future research are elaborated.

How Does Mentoring Affect Protégés’ Adaptive Performance in the Workplace: Roles of Thriving at Work and Promotion Focus

“…Among them, the former mainly involves problem-solving skills and flexible use of knowledge; the latter includes mentality adjustments in response to task changes (Allworth and Hesketh, 1999). As mentioned above, the individual's general cognitive ability, self-efficacy, personality traits, and environmental factors in the team have a significant impact on adaptive performance (Tolentino et al, 2014;Park and Park, 2019).…”

“…Based on COR theory, in a mentorship, protégés obtain knowledge and skills, relational resources, psychological resources, and opinions (Mao et al, 2016) to cope with job changes. In addition, new knowledge, skills, and positive emotions are necessary prerequisites for employees to adopt adaptive behaviors (Park and Park, 2019). It can be observed that mentoring is conducive to thriving at work and that the adaptive performance level is higher.…”

“…However, as mentioned above, the factors that influence adaptive performance, such as individual factors and organizational factors, are multifaceted. Adaptive performance is likely the result of the combined effect of individual characteristics and job/group/organizational characteristics (Park and Park, 2019). The existing research fails to integrate the various factors.…”

“…Third, mentoring is a supportive organizational factor that promotes employees’ adaptive performance ( Baranik et al, 2010 ). In addition to career support, mentors serve as protégés’ protectors, consultants, and guides, providing safe harbor, friendship, and acceptance when necessary and creating a positive group or organizational climate such that the contextual factor can effectively promote adaptive performance ( Park and Park, 2019 ). In short, mentoring provides knowledge, skills, self-efficacy, social support, and other work resources by means of career support, psychosocial support, and role modeling, which enhances employees’ motivation, ability, and employability to achieve adaptive performance ( Bozionelos et al, 2015 ).…”

Dynamic performance

“…Until now hardly any studies looked at how characteristics of the task or how the change itself influences the (adaptive) performance on the task (see e.g Jundt, Shoss, & Huang, 2015;Park & Park, 2019). Gillie and Broadbent (1989) conducted four experiments on characteristics 38 39 2 2 unforeseen changes in a task or a job, which is clear when looking at the related fields that are described in this review.…”