Psychological determinants of employee adaptation: a novel and robust learnability quotient-based fuzzy decision framework for organizational learning

Abstract

Abstract

In contemporary work environments, employees' psychological capacity to adapt to continuous economic, technological, and cultural changes have become a central concern within organizational and applied psychology. While constructs such as adaptability, learning orientation, and cognitive flexibility have been widely discussed, there remains limited consensus on which psychological components of learnability most strongly influence employee adaptation and how adaptation-oriented strategies can be systematically evaluated under uncertainty. Moreover, existing research often lacks integrative analytical frameworks that link individual cognitive-behavioral characteristics with strategic organizational learning outcomes. To address this gap, the present study conceptualizes Learnability Quotient as a multidimensional psychological construct encompassing cognitive flexibility, questioning behavior, openness to experience, and reflective learning tendencies. Building on expert-based psychological evaluations, a novel fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making framework is proposed by integrating spherical fuzzy sets, a newly developed comparative weighting evaluation based on the best criteria (COWEB) weighting technique, and the multiple normalization rating analysis (MUNRA) ranking approach. This integrated model enables the simultaneous assessment of the relative importance of learnability-related psychological indicators and the prioritization of employee adaptation strategies. Empirical results demonstrate that questioning and inquiry as well as mental flexibility emerge as the most influential psychological dimensions of learnability, highlighting the critical role of critical thinking, cognitive openness, and adaptive mental processes in effective organizational learning. Furthermore, the stability of strategy rankings across multiple scenarios supports the psychological robustness and methodological reliability of the proposed framework. By bridging cognitive-behavioral psychology and decision science, this study offers both theoretical contributions to organizational learning psychology and practical insights for designing psychologically informed adaptation strategies in contemporary organizations.