Research On Employee's Adaptive Performance And The Factors Impact On It In Changing Times

IntroductionIn changing times, organizations are characterized by changing and dynamic environments in which need workers to be adaptable. In response to it, some researchers proposed the concept of adaptive performance, which enable the employees to successfully deal with changes and uncertainties. Some researchers have explored the theoretical framework of adaptive performance, and others have studied the antecedents of adaptive performance. Results from these studied have showed that adaptive performance is a multidimensional construct, but it still remains some debates. Orthers have explored some individual difference variables'impact on adaptive performance, such as personality, self-efficacy, and cognitive factors, but neglect the environmental variables, such as perceived organizational support, empower, and autonomy. The purpose of this study is to explore the structure of adaptive performance and the relationships between perceived organizational support, generalized self-efficacy, proactive personality and adaptive performance.MethodThe data of this study is collected from 557 workers on the job from medication manufactures, IT, insurance, communications industry, advertisement companies, and so on. We conduct descriptive statistical analysis, t-test, One-Way ANOVA, confirmatory factors analyses(CFA) and structural equation modeling(SEM) statistical techniques to analysis the data.ResultsThe results of this study show that, adaptive performance is a multidimensional construct, but the correlations between the four dimensions are much too high and variance extracted estimate analysis demonstrate that the discriminant validity of the four sub-dimensions of adaptive performance is poor. T-test and One-Way ANOVA show that four dimensions of adaptive performance have significant differences on sex, age, tenure, and position. Also, the results demonstrate that perceived organizational support, generalized self-efficacy, and proactive personality are positively correlated with adaptive performance, and all have direct or indirect impact on adaptive performance.ConclusionsIn terms of the results, we conclude that,①preliminary evidence show that adaptive performance is a multidimensional construct, includes dealing with work pressure and emergency, adapting to diverse culture and complex interrelationship, on-job learning continuously and solving problems creatively; but the discriminant validity of the four dimensions are poor and need to be confirmed again in the future; ②all the four dimensions of adaptive performance have significant differences on position demographical variable and some dimensions have significant differences on sex, age, and tenure demographical variables;③proactive personality and generalized self-efficacy have a positive direct effect on all dimensions of adaptive performance, perceived organizational support has a positive direct effect on adapting to diverse culture and complex interrelationship;④generalized self-efficacy partially mediates the relationship between proactive personality and all dimensions of adaptive performance, partially mediates the relationship between perceived organizational support and adapting to diverse culture and complex interrelationship, and fully mediate the relationship between perceived organizational support and dealing with work pressure and emergency, on-job learning continuously and solving problems creatively.