Unpacking personal adaptability at work.

Adaptability is a key competency for career success. In this article, the authors examine how individual adaptability is associated with the accrual of human capital, the organization of the work environment, and the characteristics of individuals. They find that a number of factors are particularly strongly related to personal adaptability: gender, employability, education, and management support. By understanding the variety of factors that are intrinsic to individuals, those that can be developed within individuals, and work environment design, it seems possible to foster the development of personal adaptability in the workplace.

Keywords: adaptability; flexibility; work demands; stress; careers

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If we doubt that individuals struggle to adapt and accept change, we need only look at the amazing success of the "Who Moved My Cheese?" training and development materials (Johnson, 1998). The materials are popular for good reason. For many workers, the cheese has moved multiple times as organizations have been turned upside down. In place of neat hierarchical organizational charts, we find a mix of overlapping circles, process flows, and roles performed by associates, team members, coaches, and some who are not even company employees (Pearlman & Barney, 2000). New workplace technologies require change (Pulakos, Arad, Donovan, & Plamondon, 2000), and globalization demands understanding of new sets of cultural rules (Sanchez & Levine, 2001). Downsizing, rightsizing, and outsourcing all contribute to work transience and affirmation that organizations are not always built from jobs but from elements of work that need to be done (Bridges, 1994).

How, in a practical sense, should workers deal with all of this change and dislocation? How should they direct their careers, in the near and long term? Take charge. That is the advice given by career experts. It is "You & Co"; we are all self-employed (Bridges, 1994; Hakim, 1994). Our careers are "boundaryless" (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996), so opportunities transcend individual employment arrangements (Arthur, Khapova, & Wilderom, 2005).

In this turbulent environment, individuals navigate more career transitions and must be adaptable and competent learners (Hall & Chandler, 2005). However, personal career management and internal changes are more easily proclaimed than accomplished. Enacting a protean career in a shifting landscape of work may not be equally easy for all workers. The merit of such a new career form has been questioned by Scott (2003) who contends that "such a vision seems overly utopian and, at best, would characterize a minority of high-end careers .... Even Proteus needs some tangible social supports!" (p. 334). When faced with turmoil and change, why is it that some workers seem to thrive, whereas others suffer psychological or physical distress? In this article, we explore personal adaptability, one attribute that is important in dealing with change and taking charge of career direction (Heslin, 2005). By better understanding the correlates of adaptability in a turbulent workplace, the hope is to provide better insights for how individuals can develop this metacompetency and how it might be fostered through the structure of work.

Adaptability has been proposed by Hall (2002) as a career metacompetency, which along with personal identity forms the core of a protean career. It is, at its core, the capacity to change, including both the competence and the motivation to do so (Hall & Chandler, 2005).

Although recent work has addressed adaptive behaviors as they relate to particular types of jobs (Pulakos et al., 2000), beyond Hall's (2002) work, this concept has not been extensively developed in the careers literature (Goodman, 1994). Little empirical work has been done to measure and carefully explore its correlates, and there are still gaps in our understanding of the psychological resources that are needed as individuals make adult career transitions (Ebberwein, Krieshok, Ulven, & Prosser, 2004). Recently, Hall (2002) raised the question this way:

The purpose of this article is to address those questions. By building on the work of R.W. Morrison and Hall (2001) and Hall (2002), we propose that three groups of factors such as the characteristics of the individual, the characteristics of the work environment, and the measure of human capital are correlates (and perhaps antecedents) of personal adaptability (see Figure 1). The goal is to understand more clearly the genesis and support of personal adaptability in the workplace. As we unpack personal adaptability and the role of dispositional and situational correlates, we may provide a bit more guidance for those involved in the changing career landscape of the early 21st century.

Individual Adaptability

Adaptability is a personal quality that is important in handling ambiguity, dealing with uncertainty and stress, and in working outside traditional temporal and geographic boundaries (Pearlman & Barney, 2000).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

One might argue that adaptability is an innate part of individuals' personalities. Some careers research has followed this approach, seeing adaptability as a relatively inflexible disposition (Metz, 2004). At the same time, specific advice has been offered on how individuals might increase their personal adaptability (Heslin, 2005), assuming that adaptability is malleable. To explore these contrasting views, we propose that adaptability is shaped by a number of factors that are both internal and external to individuals. We argue that some individual factors such as age, race, and gender might influence adaptability insomuch as these attributes may set expectations according to social norms and produce differences in preferences and treatment in the workplace. Furthermore, we propose that the accrual of human capital in terms of occupational status, education, tenure in a work organization, experience working for a contract-based employer, and perceived employability affect one's sense of adaptability. We also argue that aspects of the work environment may increase or diminish one's self-reported adaptability. In this regard, we follow the lead of stress researchers, focusing on work demand, managerial support, and personal control (Karasek & Theorell, 1990; Van Yperen & Hagedoorn, 2003). Finally, we propose that the receipt of adequate workplace communication may enhance personal adaptability, as suggested by the literature on organizational change and restructuring (Brockner, 1992).

By investigating adaptability from this perspective, we believe that this inquiry will be important to human resources and career practitioners. For instance, if employability, education, and particular kinds of work experience make people more adaptable, then career coaches or perhaps those involved in leadership development might pay attention to the positive value of those experiences. Likewise, if work design and implementation factors such as personal control, managerial support, work demand, and communication are important in fostering adaptability, then there might be clear implications for action.

Individual Characteristics

Age

Is it the buster, boomer, or old guard employee who will be the most adaptable? Those of the Gen X generation, born between 1965 and 1981, differ in notable ways from their predecessors of the Silent Generation, born between 1925 and 1942, and the Baby Boomers, born between 1943 and 1964. Gen Xers tend to distrust hierarchy, like more informal arrangements, and prefer to make judgments based on merit rather than on status. They entered the workforce under a new employment "deal," in which career planning and development are largely individual responsibilities and where the average worker can expect to make several significant changes in employment and/or career direction during their working lives. So it seems likely that those of the X generation will be more adaptable than those in some other age categories.

R. W. Morrison and Hall (2001) report the work of Ayres and Potter (1989), indicating that the motivation to change decreases with age and propose that middle-age individuals should be more adaptable than elderly ones. Also, R. W. Morrison and Hall note that middle-aged and older adults (Reise & Gold, 1993) may have negative attitudes toward developmental experiences that are required to become adaptable because such experiences may be taking place at an unexpected time in their lives, perhaps at a time when such need for adaptation is unexpected.

We offer the following hypothesis regarding age and adaptability:

Hypothesis 1: Age will be negatively related to personal adaptability.

Gender and Race

Race and gender may be related to individuals' personal adaptability. Many studies have shown that, on average, women are more empathic than men, with superior ability to read others' unstated feelings (Goleman, 1995). Perhaps this superior ability to read cues, combined with the disproportionate amount of relational work performed by women in organizations (Fletcher, 2001), might enhance women's estimation of their own motivation and competence to successfully engage with changing circumstances.

In contrast to this assumption of advantage, gender and race have each been associated with negative outcomes in the workplace, such as harassment and discrimination (Deitch et al., 2003; Segrave, 1994). It is reasonable to expect that these experiences may affect personal resiliency and control in groups that have been harassed or that have suffered from discrimination. Furthermore, certain classes of individuals may lack sufficient resources necessary to acquire human capital. For example, wage and income levels are known to be disproportionately lower for women compared to men and for Blacks compared to Whites (Gottschalk & Danzinger, 2005). Exactly what these circumstances mean for adaptability is unclear: Does adversity or scarcity teach adaptability or squelch it? Lacking specific research support related to adaptability, these two demographic variables are examined on an exploratory basis.