Are unassuming organizations the ones that are most adaptable to change?
Collective intelligence: What kinds of organization are most resilient to change?
Open any business book and you will see a phrase like “it is not strong organizations that survive; it is the organizations that can change that will survive.” In work, there will always come a time when the environment suddenly changes and the previous ways of doing things do not apply any more.
When required to make radical changes, not just small changes to day-to-day matters, some organizations can adapt while others cannot. What are the differences between these two types?
The paper I discuss today investigates the factors that affect a team’s adaptability, using test tasks.
In the study on university students, 64 teams of three students each were formed and each team was given a decision-making task that took three hours. The study investigated how each team was able to respond to environmental changes and the cognitive and personality factors that affected adaptability when the environment was changed during the task to hinder communication between members.
The results showed that surprisingly, ambitious teams that seek high performance have poorer adaptability to change than unassuming teams that are satisfied with lower performance and that the teams with the greatest adaptability to change were those with a high desire to learn.
These kinds of differences go unnoticed in the case of small changes but become apparent when the changes are larger, and I wondered whether the way that organizations that constantly exhibit high performance in ordinary situations are unable to cope with rapid changes to the industry and go into decline is due to a philosophy of performance before all else. I also wondered whether an organization that includes an appropriate number of introverted people may be more adaptable in times of crisis than an organization comprising high-performance oriented extroverts alone.
[Abstract]
Halfway through a 3-hour experiment in which 64 3-person teams needed to make a series of decisions, a communications channel began to deteriorate, and teams needed to adapt their system of roles in order to perform effectively. Consistent with previous research, team composition with respect to members' cognitive ability was positively associated with adaptation. Adaptation was also influenced by interactions of team goal difficulty and team composition with respect to team members' goal orientation. Teams with difficult goals and staffed with high-performance orientation members were especially unlikely to adapt. Teams with difficult goals and staffed with high-learning orientation members were especially likely to adapt. Supplemental analyses provided insight into the observed effects in that the difficulty of team goals and members' goal orientation predicted interpersonal, transition, and action processes, all of which predicted team adaptation.
