The skills that help employees adapt: Empirical validation of a four-category framework

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE The skills that help employees adapt: Empirical validation of a four-category framework Oscar Ybarra ID* Gies College of Business, Champaign, Illinois, United States of America * Abstract a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Ybarra O (2023) The skills that help employees adapt: Empirical validation of a fourcategory framework. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0282074. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282074 Editor: Christian Stamov Roßnagel, Jacobs University Bremen, GERMANY Received: May 5, 2022 Accepted: February 8, 2023 Published: February 24, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Oscar Ybarra. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Data are available on OPEN ICPSR (https://www.openicpsr.org/ openicpsr/) under accession number 169801. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Globalization, technological advances, economic and geopolitical shocks, pandemics, and any number of novel or unanticipated events have one thing in common: they represent change and require dynamic responses and adaptation from organizations, teams, and individuals. A critical resource for individuals to be adaptive are broad skills relevant to varied organizational conditions. These adaptive skills have been discussed in diverse venues but rarely in the organizational literature. Also, most, if not all, of extant conceptual frameworks related to adaptive skills remain unvalidated. The purpose of this research was to organize these skills, define and situate them in the relevant organizational and psychological literatures, and empirically test a proposed four-category framework. The experimental results supported the C+MAC framework, as skills were better categorized in terms of their theoretically related category. Additionally, the four-category framework proved a better fit to the skills compared to an influential, alternative model. The findings’ implications are discussed, noting how an empirically validated framework can facilitate understanding of how individuals engage with organizational environments and organizations get their work done. Introduction Turbulent times for organizations are not new and will likely continue if not accelerate in the future [1–4]. From the great recession of just a few years ago, to the current pandemic and post-pandemic reality, a looming climate crisis destined to affect many industries, continued pressures from unanticipated global events and competition, and rapid technological improvements, many organizations will continue to face an operating environment that is turbulent and competitive. These factors create uncertainty and doubt about organizations’ existence [5], necessitating flexible structures and processes [6], as well as learning and adapting [e.g., 7]. To be nimble and adaptive, though, organizations now more than ever need their building blocks—the employees who are at the heart of the transformation process—to be adaptive. Adaptation in the organizational literature Before discussing individual adaptation, it is important to briefly review adaptation in the broader organizational literature. This review is not comprehensive but intended to highlight the significance of the adaptation concept as well as its wide application. PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282074 February 24, 2023 1 / 23 PLOS ONE The skills that help employees adapt Organizational adaptation At the macro level, the assumption that organizations are adaptive is apparent in the foundations of organization theory [8], open systems theory [9], in behavioral [10] and resource views of the firm [11], and in theories of organizational learning [12] (for a recent review see [13]). Some organizational scholars have even suggested that adaptation is the central concern of strategic management [14]. Normative approaches to organization design have also been proposed, using empirical and modeling techniques that are aimed at achieving congruence of mission and strategy with an organization’s operating environment [e.g., 15]. Group/Team adaptation. Much of the work in organizations gets done by teams. At this mezzo level of analysis, the concept of adaptation has seen rapid expansion in the last twenty or so years. Group or team adaptation has been broadly discussed from an evolutionary perspective, where the fit between member expertise and the challenges confronting the group is seen as a basis for adaptive leadership [16]. But most attention has been paid by organizational and human factors scholars, who have developed several theoretical models to describe team adaptation [2, 3, 17–19]. For example, Burke and colleagues [2] conceive of team adaptation broadly as an ongoing emergent phenomenon that results from dynamic and recursive, individual and dyadic team member actions aimed at detecting and responding to change to produce functional outcomes. Maynard, Kennedy, and Sommer [3] see team adaptation as benefitting from a requisite team capacity (member characteristics, member adaptability but also team structures and task features) and effective team process (action, transition, interpersonal; see [20]). Christian et al. [17] propose that team process and other emergent states will vary as a function of the event (adaptive stimulus) the team is adapting to, which can vary in origin (internal or external to the organization) and duration (temporary or sustained). More recent work on team adaptation has begun to empirically test various aspects of the process, such as transactive memory systems and implicit coordination [21], the different phases of team adaptation [22], shared team mental models [e.g., 23], in-action team reflection [24], and how team leadership interacts with team behavioral interaction patterns [25]. Individual adaptation. The deployment of teams is a way for organizations to adapt to dynamic environments [2, 3, 26]. Individuals of course make up teams, and models of team adaptation do consider individuals as inputs to team adaptation [e.g., 2, 3, 27]). But the adaptation of individuals should be viewed as an independent process that can interact with other aspects of the organizational transformation process (tasks & goals, other formal structures, the informal organizational structure), resources, technology, and other social relational patterns [cf. 28]. A variety of research at the individual level is relevant to adaptation. For example, it is proposed that leaders are adaptive to the extent they can deploy behaviors suited to changing organizational contexts [29], a stance in line with older contingency theories of leadership (for a review see [30]). Many (...truncated)