Organizational Adaptation

What went right during the COVID crisis: The capabilities of local actors and lasting innovations in oncology care and research

This article will elaborate how oncology care and research was adapted during the COVID pandemic in the Metropole of Lyon (France), including the lasting innovations that came out of the crisis. The research method involved 22 semi-structured qualitative interviews of healthcare professionals, managers, and researchers in the Lyon, France region coming from both public and private academic hospitals. The interviews took place from February 2021-December 2022 in order to assess the long-term adaptations and innovations in cancer care organization in the post-COVID era. The main results show adaptations and innovations in 1) new processes and resources to facilitate disciplinary and interdisciplinary work; 2) harmonization and streamlining of patient journeys. In the discussion section, we will mobilize the capabilities approach, an interdisciplinary social sciences approach that focuses on the capabilities of persons to be and to do, to elaborate the conditions by which local actors were able to be agile, to adapt and to innovate in spite of the healthcare emergency and in coherence with their professional and personal values.

A Process Perspective on Adaptive Performance: Research Insights and New Directions

Given its acceptance and value as an important facet of workplace behavior, research has primarily attempted to understand adaptive performance by way of examining its antecedents. Although useful, these findings provide little insight into the in-situ, intra-individual processes that occur during adaptive performance (i.e., How do people adapt to change? What determines the speed at which people adapt? How do failures to adapt occur?). The current paper develops and presents a process model of adaptation in order to provide a framework for organizing, understanding, and investigating the in-situ process involved when individuals adapt to changes in job demands. In particular, we suggest that in order to successfully adapt to a changing task environment, individuals must go through a series of processes in order to detect the nature of a change, diagnose its cause, develop or refine strategies, learn additional knowledge or skills, and enact appropriate performance behaviors. At the same time, dynamic emotional, cognitive, motivational, and situational factors serve as proximal inputs and outputs of these processes. In doing so, they shape the success and speed with which people adapt and suggest a broadened set of outcomes of adaptive performance. We describe how this model can be leveraged to stimulate dynamic adaptive performance research and to promote adaptive performance in applied settings.

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

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.

European Political Science versus the Pandemic: Patterns of Professional Adaptation

The emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak can be considered a potential driver of changes not only in academic disciplines but also, as most observers underline, in the teaching mission of higher education. This raises the main question of this article, that is, exactly whether and how an external shock such as COVID-19 can impact the comprehensive profile of academic disciplines. By focusing on European political science, the article assesses the differences among scholars in this community in terms of potential long-term reactions. The study, based on the outcomes of an original survey conducted among 1400 European professional political scientists (EPSs) at the end of 2020, aims at detecting the "predisposition to adaptation" of the community, by examining the attitudes revealed by EPSs during the early phase of pandemic. In this regard, we focus on the explanations of different aspects of 'professional adaptation', discussing three dimensions that seem to be present in our sample, although with very different weights: passive, proactive and innovative adaptation.

Field disasters, routine shifts, and adaptation performance: Evidence from the Chernobyl disaster

Following a field disaster, organizations must be able to adapt to complicated new requirements like improved safety standards by changing their existing routines. Post-disaster, fewer deviations attributed to internal factors are expected and seen as evidence of adaptation. Using a difference-in-differences approach with data on nuclear power plants (NPPs) in 33 countries from 1976 to 2004, this study finds that, contrary to expectations, operational deviations attributed to human factors at NPPs increased globally for a long period after the Chernobyl disaster. This study argues that this counterintuitive performance is a manifestation of adaptive routines. To adapt to the environmental requirements for heightened safety standards, organizations may tend to alter their routines for attributing deviation causes by facilitating and transparently reporting the classification of more deviation causes as internal factors. These arguments extend organizational adaptation theory by suggesting that explicit performance does not necessarily manifest as adaptive routines because of the potential conflict between explicit and implicit performance dimensions in the context of complicated adaptation goals.

Innovativeness as the Key to MSMEs’ Performances

Research on Micro Small Medium Enterprises (MSME) has always been an exciting area of study because of its crucial role; however, it turns out that MSMEs have many problems. The problems, such as human resources and their abilities, are rarely discussed. MSMEs tend to be formed because of a compulsion to do so, whereas companies are created by opportunities; therefore, it is essential to include entrepreneur orientation and dynamic capability elements in making MSME performance models. This study used SEM analysis with 333 respondents spread across six provinces in Indonesia. The results showed that innovativeness, which is part of entrepreneur orientation, is critical in the formation of MSMEs’ performances. Moreover, based on the calculation of indirect effects, it revealed that innovativeness through marketing capabilities has a significant influence on the performance of MSMEs.

Navigating Conflicting Influences During Complex Strategic Changes: The Contribution of Diagnosis, Congruence, and Leadership

This study explored how managers implement complex strategic changes with multiple, often conflicting, influences and initiatives. A large, regional operating division of a French electrical utility was implementing a top-down, enterprise-wide digital transformation and developing broad agile capabilities in a participative way. Conclusions from the 18-month collaborative research effort suggest that three change activities made pragmatic and theoretically insightful contributions. First, diagnosis – a process not integrated in theories of strategic change and adaptation – served as a powerful source of tailored solutions that orchestrated diverse change activities. Second, the organization's existing culture and identity – typically considered a target of or constraint to change – became an important source of change congruence. Third, managers collectively leveraged and re-framed hierarchical authority in leading the change. Exercising authority in traditional ways kept emerging changes safe. Reframing authority as the power to convene conversations helped to focus expertise on key issues.

When Reflection Hurts: The Effect of Cognitive Processing Types on Organizational Adaptation to Discontinuous Change

Technological breakthroughs, institutional disruptions, and natural disasters often alter the course of organizations and entire industries. Such discontinuous changes threaten organizations’ survival by affecting the value of the knowledge accumulated in routines and capabilities. Although it is widely acknowledged that managerial cognition is a critical antecedent of organizational responses to discontinuous change, the role of type 1 (intuitive) and type 2 (reflective) processing in the adaptation of shared patterns of behavior, that is, routines, remains understudied. Drawing on dual-process theory, we propose that particular features of type 1 processing render this approach superior to type 2 processing, especially in highly ambiguous environments in which information is limited and difficult to verify. We tested our hypotheses in a longitudinal experiment linking individual-level factors with organizational-level practices of routine adaptation. Experienced managers, paired in 80 groups, developed routines in a first round of a simulation game; in a second round, we then introduced a discontinuous change making previous routines obsolete in order to observe how they adapted. The data show that priming type 1 processing facilitates organizational adaptation more than type 2 processing by providing faster, more routinized, efficiently coordinated, and optimal responses. In addition, type 1 appears to be more functional in highly ambiguous environments, whereas type 1 and type 2 processes yield similar levels of performance under low levels of ambiguity. Overall, our study advances the understanding of the nondeliberative dimension of organizational adaptation to discontinuous change.

Examining resilience of disaster response system in response to COVID-19

We examine the COVID-19 response in China by conceptualizing resilience from the complex adaptive system perspective, including a discussion of the factors contributing to the resilience of the disaster response system. Methodologically, a network-based model was employed to describe the disaster response system. In addition to a traditional network analysis, the dynamics network analysis was conducted to assess the evolution of the disaster response system with a time slice analysis. This study presents theoretical and practical contributions to the field of disaster management by utilizing the complex adaptive system perspective and investigating context-specific resilience of a disaster response system.

Discussing the Use of Complexity Theory in Engineering Management: Implications for Sustainability

What is the state-of-the-art literature regarding the adoption of the complexity theory (CT) in engineering management (EM)? What implications can be derived for future research and practices concerning sustainability issues? In this conceptual article, we critically discuss the current status of complexity research in EM. In this regard, we use IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, because it is currently considered the leading journal in EM, and is as a reliable, heuristic proxy. From this journal, we analyze 38 representative publications on the topic published since 2000, and extrapolated through a rigorous keyword-based article search. In particular, we show that: (1) the adoption of CT has been associated with a wide range of key themes in EM, such as new product development, supply chain, and project management. (2) The adoption of CT has been witnessed in an increasing amount of publications, with a focus on conceptual modeling based on fuzzy logics, stochastic, or agent-based modeling prevailing. (3) Many key features of CT seem to be quite clearly observable in our dataset, with modeling and optimizing decision making, under uncertainty, as the dominant theme. However, only a limited number of studies appear to formally adhere to CT, to explain the different EM issues investigated. Thus, we derive various implications for EM research (concerning the research in and practice on sustainability issues).