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4. Adaptive Performance and Work Stress
Work stress has been considered as a major factor of many work outcomes, like performance, nonproductive behavior and turnover (see stress (psychological)). An employee being able to adapt to change within an organization is more focused, and able to deal with stressful situations. An employee who is unable to absolve their strain is unable to focus on what is occurring in the organization, such as organizational change Specifically, not only can work stress predict adaptive performance to a considerable extent, there are also a lot of overlaps between adaptive performance and stress coping.

4.1 Adaptive performance and stress appraisal
Although it has been long recognized that work stress generally has a negative effects on job performance, more recent studies revealed some differential influence resulting from different perceptions of stressors. When faced with a new situation, individuals would spontaneously begin to evaluate their own abilities and skills as compared with the requirements of the situation, which is referred to as stress appraisals Such stress appraisal has two stages: primary appraisal and secondary appraisal. In the primary appraisal stage, individuals evaluate what potential threats there will be, concerning the demands from situation and the goals and values of themselves. In the secondary appraisal stage, individuals evaluate the resources they have to deal with those requirements. The results of appraisal, after two stages, are indicated to fall on a continuum between two extremes of being challenged and threatened Challenge appraisals mean that individuals feel their resources, like abilities and social support to be abundant sufficient to fulfill requirements of the situation. Threat appraisals, on the other hand, mean that individuals are not confident about their abilities or other resources to respond to the situation demands. There have been evidences that treat appraisals and challenge appraisals could influence job performance distinctively As for adaptive performance specifically, research found that the more challenging (i.e., the less threatening) one’s stress appraisals are, the more adaptive performance he/she would have  This relationship is suggested to be mediated by self-efficacy, which is a belief about one’s capacities for certain tasks (see Self-efficacy). Challenging rather than threatening appraisals would lead to higher levels of self-efficacy, and thus benefit individuals’ adaptive performance.

4.2 Adaptive performance and stress coping
Coping, as a form of response to stressors, describes how individuals handle stressful events. It seems almost the same to one dimension of adaptive performance conceptually (i.e., the Handling Work Stress dimension), and coping has been suggested to be another form of adaptation However, there remain differences between stress coping and adaptive performance. Stress coping could be divided into several styles and strategies based on several theories (see coping (psychology)). One general idea is to divide coping as active coping and avoidant coping Active coping means to proactively address and resolve stressful events, like quitting a stressful job and changing into a less overwhelming one. Avoidant coping means to reduce stress by ignoring it, like involving in problematic drinking. Another set of coping strategy types including problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping Problem-focused coping involves using skills and knowledge to deal with the cause of their problems. Emotion-focused coping involves release negative emotions by ways like distracting or disclaiming. Adaptive performance involves a mixture of different coping strategies. Considering that adaptive performance basically concerns positive aspects of behaviors, it should be more closely related to coping strategies that have positive effects. As previous research suggests, active coping and problem-focused coping tend to have more benefits  Therefore, adaptive performance are more likely to contain such behaviors in stressful situations.

6 See also
1 stress (psychological)

2 self-efficacy

3 coping (psychology)

4 Employee engagement

5 Organizational commitment