Adaptability of the US Engineering and Technical Workforce Proceedings of a Workshop (2018) / Chapter Skim
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4 What Does Adaptability Look Like?
4 What Does Adaptability Look Like?
Pages 21-33
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From page 21... ...
(Steve Kozlowski) • he adaptive capabilities of teams are emergent and can be nur T tured and shaped, and interventions can be effective, if underly ing mechanisms of team formation and contextual factors are known.
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From page 22... ...
The characteristics of adaptability at each level are somewhat different, the panelists observed, but there are commonalities across all four, such as the role of motivation. INDIVIDUAL ADAPTABILITY Adaptability is a change in behavior as the environment changes that improves outcomes, said Christian Schunn, senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center and professor of psychology, learning sciences and policy, and intelligent systems at the University of Pittsburgh.
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The frontal lobes of the brain are involved in fast adaptations, Schunn explained. When "something is different from what was going on before, that's when the frontal lobes come online, and we force ourselves to do something different from what our muscle memory is telling us to do." Damage to the frontal lobes can severely impair adaptation -- as measured, for example, by pattern matching tests -- even when people know that they should be adapting (Ridderinkhof et al.
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From page 24... ...
Adaptability is driven by one's own initiative and not externally imposed by the demands of one's organization or supervisor, or by an external unexpected event, Wilson said. In some cases, it requires significant changes in behaviors, cognitive skills, and attitudes; in other cases it requires just minor adjustments.
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From page 25... ...
For example, "How do we integrate the development of the soft skills over a career, not just for executives but for…all employees at all levels, and then how do we integrate those soft skills with the hard skills that have traditionally been the domain of engineering professionals? " An area that warrants research attention is the need to anticipate changes rather than reacting to them, and another is the need for adaptability to be driven by an individual's desire and intention to improve performance, rather than by the boss saying, "Here are the four things you must do to adapt or you're fired." Finally,
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From page 26... ...
It's been defined as "performance capabilities [where] changing external contingencies require rapid shifts in role requirements across team members" (Kozlowski et al.
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From page 27... ...
This approach looks at desirable performance capabilities such as dealing with emergencies, handling stress, managing uncertainty, learning, and being culturally, interpersonally, and physically adaptive. It then examines the kinds of general cognitive, ability, and personality characteristics that are broadly predictive of those kinds of capabilities.
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From page 28... ...
Domain general is about human capital -- hiring people with certain capabilities; domain specific is about training -- developing certain skill sets. From a training and development viewpoint, it is important to remember that team adaptability is emergent and evolves over time.
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From page 29... ...
Individual differences can also be important, whether in terms of goal orientation versus performance orientation or avoidance of mistakes and difficult tasks. Teamwork typically requires members to regulate attention and effort around multiple goals -- individual and team -- and to shift the focus of regulation as the situation dictates.
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From page 30... ...
Kirr Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Center for Organizational Learning, Innovation and Knowledge. She cited a study of advanced jet manufacturing in which it was shown that the total number of labor hours required to produce each aircraft drops with the cumulative number of aircraft produced, with improvements decreasing over time.
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The third factor that can improve organizational learning is the effective use of technology. The introduction of technology can speed progression along the learning curve, through either a sudden improvement (that is, a shift in the intercept of the curve)
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an airline pilot to be able to recover from an emergency, this is about skills flying an airplane, and not just handling emergencies." No magic bullet can address adaptability, said Wilson; it is one of a set of soft skills that need greater emphasis at all levels of education. The National Academy of Engineering has moved in this direction through such initiatives as the Grand Challenges Scholars Program and the
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. "Educational institutions need to be more intellectually and professionally aggressive to say that adaptability and other kinds of soft skills are a matter of national performance.
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