Location
Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
Event Website
https://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Start Date
7-1-2025 12:00 AM
End Date
10-1-2025 12:00 AM
Description
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.
Recommended Citation
Blomqvist, Kirsimarja; Henttonen, Kaisa; Toivikko, Tuuli; and Salo, Niina, "Employee Proactive Adaptive Behavior during an Abrupt Change: Insights from Knowledge Workers’ Unplanned Adaptation to Digital Collaboration" (2025). Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2025 (HICSS-58). 7.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-58/cl/distributed_collaboration/7
Employee Proactive Adaptive Behavior during an Abrupt Change: Insights from Knowledge Workers’ Unplanned Adaptation to Digital Collaboration
Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
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.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-58/cl/distributed_collaboration/7