Event: School Seminar

TITLE: Understanding adaptability: The role of self-regulation

ABSTRACT: The modern work environment is undergoing major changes in organization and technology with significant effects on employees. Understanding how individuals cope with changes at their workplaces is consequently increasingly important for organizations. In research, individual adaptation to workplace changes has become an important dimension of work performance. Work and organizational psychologists have begun to systematically study adaptive performance in order to gather a deeper understanding of how individuals cope with, respond to, and/or support changes that affect their work. Researchers have focused on many different aspects of change with different experimental tasks and samples ranging from microlab to larger organizational changes. In this seminar, research is presented which focuses on the role of self-regulation while adapting to changes at work. I will present results of two longitudinal field studies and one experimental study showing that self-regulatory skills such as concentration on the new demands and disengagement from past experiences help to respond to changes at work.