Understanding team maladaptation through the lens of the four R's of adaptation

The process of team adaptation is crucial for team success as effectiveness in today's workplace hinges upon teams that are flexible and dynamic in the unavoidable presence of change. A considerable amount of work has been conducted on the positive aspects of a team's adaptation process (e.g., successful adaptation resulting in beneficial outcomes). These efforts, however, have largely ignored the process and outcomes of maladaptation when a team fails to adapt properly. We use influential works (e.g., Burke, Stagl, Salas, Pierce, & Kendall, 2006; Kozlowski, Watola, Jensen, Kim, & Botero, 2009) to build a concise heuristic (e.g., the four R's) that is then used to outline and describe potential errors teams may engage in before, during, and after a change that cause maladaptive outcomes. We offer propositions around our heuristic that can readily utilized in research contexts to guide further exploration into team adaptation so that we may better understand the processes underlying maladaptive outcomes.