| The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the nature of adaptability as a performance criterion in organizations. Since adaptation can be found in different levels of organizations with somewhat different behavioral contents, a critical question for researchers is how individual adaptive performance (AP) contributes to team-level adaptive performance. Following from a multilevel perspective, this study conceptualizes team AP as an emergent process. That is, team AP emerges out of individual adaptive processes (i.e., a “bottom-up” emergence). Also, cross-level effects are posited, such that team characteristics (team efficacy and learning climate) will moderate or affect the emergence. At the individual level of analysis, proactive learning (continuous learning activity) in a dynamic environment is assumed to influence on individual AP as an intermediate variable. Finally, this study also tests the effect of individual differences on continuous learning and team characteristics. Individual members of teams working in a utility organization were surveyed on several antecedents of adaptive performance, such as continuous learning, team efficacy, individual goal orientation, and conscientiousness. Team leaders and higher-level supervisors rated AP using a set of measures developed for this study. The multilevel nature of variables was tested using a series of multilevel statistical analyses, and cross-level relationships in the proposed model were examined using random coefficient modeling. Results supported a composition model of team adaptive performance: AP emerged at the team level as an aggregate of individual AP. At the individual level of analysis, continuous learning was the most immediate antecedent of AP. Mastery goal orientation was found to have an indirect effect on AP, through its effects on continuous learning. Finally, cross-level effects were found in that team climate had a direct effect on individual AP. The main contribution of this study is a new conceptualization of performance within a framework of multilevel theory and analysis. By specifying the individual-team relationships in an emerging performance construct, the results of this research avoid errors of misspecification in utilizing individual-level data to estimate a higher-level construct. The results also provided practical implications to help align human resource management with higher-level organizational factors, such as team effectiveness and strategy. |
