The rapid rate of technological innovation taking place in an increasingly interconnected global business environment has created workplaces rife with change, both in terms of how work is performed inside organizations as well as in the environment within which the organization operates (Burke, Pierce, & Salas, 2006; Pulakos, Arad, Donovan, & Plamondon, 2000). As a result, the traditional means of defining and evaluating employee performance may no longer be valid because new behaviors (e.g. constant learning) and abilities (e.g. high-order thinking) are increasingly important (Cascio, 1995). This has led to the emergence of a new performance domain, adaptive performance, related to an individual's ability to effectively respond to changes in the workplace. Despite the importance of adaptive performance for modern organizations, relatively little is known about individual and contextual antecedents of adaptive performance. This study aims to begin addressing this deficiency by relying on control theory to further our knowledge of the relationships between initial and subsequent adaptive performance with historically important predictors of overall performance, including intelligence as well as performance relevant Big-5 personality traits. In addition, these relationships are evaluated in the presence of difficult, specific performance goals that are commonly employed by organizations. Novel software was developed to adapt the stock pricing exercise to the task change paradigm in order to test these hypotheses using a sample of 261 student participants.
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