Employee Proactive Adaptive Behavior during an Abrupt Change: Insights from Knowledge Workers’ Unplanned Adaptation to Digital Collaboration

Abstract

Knowledge workers’ ability to adapt to change is critical in increasingly dynamic and unpredictable work contexts. Despite abundant research on employee adaptive behavior, scholarly understanding remains scarce about employees’ proactive adaptive behavior during unplanned and abrupt changes caused by external factors. In this paper, we study how knowledge workers adapted to digital collaboration during the Covid-19 crisis, i.e., a situation where change was rapid, unplanned, and even unmanaged. Based on our inductive qualitative study, we identify three types of employee adaptive behavior: reacting, developing, and institutionalizing. We further show that here organizational support and digital support have important and complementary roles in supporting employees’ proactive adaptive behavior.