Reflecting the highly interdependent context of the workplace, researchers and organizational leaders have increasingly recognized the importance of interpersonal adaptability for employee success. However, little is known about what interpersonal adaptability consists of, leaving it difficult to measure or train. The present study sought to address this gap by integrating interpersonal theory, a clinically-based perspective founded on a circumplex of interpersonal behavior, with organizational approaches. As part of this integration, the present research used a newly created situational measure of interpersonal adaptability to investigate the ways in which such adaptability may relate to meaningful outcomes in the workplace. Specifically, mediation models proposed that an individual's perceptions of a coworker's interpersonal adaptability would be positively related to the extent to which he/she would want to work with the coworker on (if the coworker was a peer), or assign the coworker to (if the coworker was a direct report) tasks high in interpersonal content (e.g., leading a team), through the mechanisms of liking to work with the coworker and perceptions of the coworker's interpersonal effectiveness. To test this model, a global sample of 208 executives from a large, multinational organization rated either a randomly assigned peer or direct report. Using a score of "warm adaptability" as the interpersonal adaptability measure, support for the mediation model was found for the group that rated direct reports, but was not found for the group that rated peers.
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