The Changing Nature of Change Resistance

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. Jones ◽  
Andrew H. Van de Ven
Keyword(s):  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Change Resistance ◽  
Organizational Changes ◽  
Supportive Leadership ◽  
Health Care Clinics ◽  
Employee Resistance ◽  
Extended Duration ◽  
Negative Relationships ◽  
Over Time

This research examines whether relationships between change resistance and its consequences and antecedents strengthen or weaken over time during an extended duration of organizational change. In 40 health care clinics undergoing a 3-year period of significant organizational changes, we found that resistance to change had increasingly negative relationships over time with two important consequences: employees’ commitment to the organization and perceptions of organizational effectiveness. That these relationships became stronger (rather than weaker) over time suggests festering effects of resistance to change. We also found that over time supportive leadership was increasingly impactful in reducing change resistance. A major implication of this research for practice is that it is important for change agents to address employee resistance because, left unchecked, it can fester and increasingly inflict harm. Also, engaging in supportive leader behaviors can be particularly useful in ameliorating resistance to change at later stages of a change initiative.

Resistance to Organizational Change in Academia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1451-1471
Author(s):  
Devi Akella ◽  
Grace Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Change ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Assessment Process ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
College Planning ◽  
Program Accreditation ◽  
Employee Resistance

Resistance to change happens to be a phenomenon in which both the change agents and change recipients are equally responsible for all forms of resistance. Resistance and its various forms are an outcome of the change agents' observations and their interpretations of the conversations, behavior, and reactions of the change recipients. This chapter uses auto-ethnographic reflexive narratives of two change agents involved in the self-assessment process at a college planning to seek US-based business program accreditation to make sense of the change process. The purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the under-reflected role of the change agents and how they influence and affect the behavior of change recipients and thereby contribute towards employee resistance. The chapter also emphasizes the crucial role of reflection and introspection in the sensemaking activities of the change agents in the entire change initiative and thereby adds evidence-based organizational change and development initiatives in an academic setting where research is limited.

scholarly journals Us and Them – First-line Management and Change Resistance

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Rønningstad
Keyword(s):  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Change Resistance ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Change Processes ◽  
Individual Resistance ◽  
First Line ◽  
Line Managers ◽  
Written Responses

Change agents are vital in enacting organizational change, yet we know little about the specific challenges first-line managers face in this role.This study draws on written responses from man- agers in Norwegian public welfare organizations to describe the trials of being a change agent. The responses reveal that issues arise from resistance among recipients of the change and from the nature of the manager’s role in the organization. Within these categories, four challenges are delineated: (1) fall-out from ‘change fatigue’, (2) individual resistance to change, (3) managers being caught between two worlds, and (4) a lack of managerial discretion.These challenges could potentially limit the change agent’s efficiency. The study suggests areas for future research and ways for public welfare organizations to improve their change processes  

scholarly journals Handling Resistance to Change When Societal and Workplace Logics Conflict

2020 ◽  
pp. 000183922096276
Author(s):  
Namrata Malhotra ◽  
Charlene Zietsma ◽  
Timothy Morris ◽  
Michael Smets
Keyword(s):  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Work Life ◽  
Work Life Balance ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Societal Change ◽  
Life Balance ◽  
Response Pair ◽  
Time Logic ◽  
Over Time

Changes in societal logics often leave firms’ policies and practices out of step. Yet when firms introduce a change that brings in a new societal logic, employees may resist, even though they personally value the change, because the incoming logic conflicts with existing organizational logics. How can change agents handle logic-based resistance to an organizational initiative that introduces a new logic? We studied elite law firms that introduced a new role into their traditional up-or-out career path in response to associates’ anonymously expressed desire for better work–life balance, which associates resisted because expressing family concerns was illegitimate within the firms. Change agents responded to three forms of resisters’ logic-based concerns—irreconcilability, ambiguity, and contradiction—with three tailored responses—redirecting, reinforcing, and reassuring—using contextually legitimate logic elements. Over time logic elements of each concern–response pair harmonized to enable individuals to enact their logics seamlessly and organizations to update the existing logic settlement to assimilate the societal change. We demonstrate that the way available logics are accessed and activated between pluralistic change agents and resisters can enable logic settlements to be updated in response to societal change. We draw insights about how logics do or do not constrain agency.

Resistance to Organizational Change in Academia

2019 ◽  
pp. 361-381
Author(s):  
Devi Akella ◽  
Grace Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Change ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Assessment Process ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
College Planning ◽  
Program Accreditation ◽  
Employee Resistance

Resistance to change happens to be a phenomenon in which both the change agents and change recipients are equally responsible for all forms of resistance. Resistance and its various forms are an outcome of the change agents' observations and their interpretations of the conversations, behavior, and reactions of the change recipients. This chapter uses auto-ethnographic reflexive narratives of two change agents involved in the self-assessment process at a college planning to seek US-based business program accreditation to make sense of the change process. The purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the under-reflected role of the change agents and how they influence and affect the behavior of change recipients and thereby contribute towards employee resistance. The chapter also emphasizes the crucial role of reflection and introspection in the sensemaking activities of the change agents in the entire change initiative and thereby adds evidence-based organizational change and development initiatives in an academic setting where research is limited.

scholarly journals Resistance to (Digital) Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-236
Author(s):  
Antonia B. Scholkmann
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Change Resistance ◽  
Educational Researcher ◽  
Research Traditions ◽  
Employee Resistance ◽  
Disruptive Change

AbstractResistance to change has been elaborated on from different perspectives: with a focus on employee resistance to change and as a systemic phenomenon, but also in the light of digital change and digital transformation. However, an integration of these approaches is not easy to find. This chapter discusses the phenomenon of resistance to change in light of current understandings of the concept as well as new elaborations, which might help to pinpoint specific challenges of digital change resistance. To this end, I will dive into the research traditions that have been built up around the concept. In order to understand resistance to digital change, specifically, I will draw upon the theory of Danish educational researcher Knut Illeris and explore the potential of his writings to explain resistance to digital change from a learning perspective. Throughout I will use examples from higher education digitalization research, to illustrate the respective phenomena. Key navigation points of this chapter are to elaborate resistance to (digital) change both as an individual and a systemic phenomenon and to contribute to a better understanding of resistance to digital change in light of incremental and disruptive change expectations.

scholarly journals Can Global, Extended, and Repeated Ransomware Attacks Overcome the User's Status Quo Bias and Cause a Switch of System?

2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Alex Zarifis ◽  
Xusen Cheng ◽  
Uchitha Jayawickrama ◽  
Simone Corsi
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Status Quo Bias ◽  
Extended Duration ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Global Reach

Ransomware (RW) attacks’ effectiveness has increased causing far reaching consequences that are not fully understood. The ability to disrupt core services, the global reach, extended duration and the repetition has increased their ability to harm an organization. One aspect that needs to be understood better is the effect on the user. The user in the current environment is exposed to new technologies that might be adopted but there are also habits of using existing systems. The habits have developed over time with trust increasing in the organization in contact directly and the institutions supporting it. This research explores whether the global, extended and repeated RW attacks reduce the trust and inertia sufficiently to change long held habits in using information systems. The model tested measures the effect of the RW attack on the e-commerce status quo to evaluate if it is significant enough to overcome the user’s resistance to change.

scholarly journals Humor Styles as New Resources in a Primary Preventive Perspective: Reducing Resistance to Change for Negotiation

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. 2485
Author(s):  
Annamaria Di Fabio ◽  
Mirko Duradoni
Keyword(s):  
Personality Traits ◽  
Work Environment ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Negotiation Process ◽  
Humor Styles ◽  
Failure Risk ◽  
Negotiation Processes ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Negative Relationships ◽  
Over Time

Reducing resistance to change is fundamental to dealing with the rapid and continuous changes of the 21st century labor market. Personality traits have been widely studied in relation to resistance to change. However, personality is not completely suitable for primary prevention intervention, since it does not change over time. Instead, humor styles appear to be a promising preventive resource to facilitate the negotiation process by enabling individuals to cope with the current work environment. Using a sample of 149 university students, this study analyzed the relationship between personality traits, such as extraversion and emotionality, humor styles, and resistance to change. The mediation analysis highlighted that both affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles could promote integrative negotiations within organizations in relation to change, due to their negative relationships with resistance to change. Thus, implementing dedicated interventions to increase the usage of affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles could help in lowering the failure risk in negotiation processes, supporting changes.

Resistance

2011 ◽  
pp. 70-83
Author(s):  
Dianne Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Change Management ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Enterprise Resource Planning ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Resource Planning ◽  
It Investments ◽  
Employee Resistance ◽  
Management Techniques

Resistance to change has long been recognised as a critically important factor that can influence the success or otherwise of implementing any technological innovation. Information technology (IT) focused interventions, for example, business process re-engineering (BPR) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), are often quoted as examples of costly failures, with reported levels of dissatisfaction with strategic IT investments ranging from 20-70 percent and that employee resistance was to blame. The intention of this chapter is to rethink resistance. The author suggests that resistance remains to this day a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that continues to affect the outcomes of change, both negatively and positively. Although research has procured a solid understanding of resistance and the benefits that can accrue to an organisation through its proper utilisation, it appears that the classical adversarial approach remains the dominant means of managing resistance because such learning is not reflected in modern management techniques. The author concludes that as companies in every industry are now translating the power and possibilities of e-business into strategic and operational realities, new approaches in change management are required to help organisations to understand the complex dynamics of technological innovation and especially the multifaceted nature of resistance.

Protests, Rallies, Marches, and Social Movements as Organizational Change Agents

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Line Germain ◽  
Phyllis Robertson ◽  
Sarah Minnis
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Human Resource Development ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Organizational Changes ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Organizational Policies ◽  
Organizational Policies And Practices ◽  
Policies And Procedures ◽  
Policies And Practices

The Problem Social movements can impact organizations and employees through changes in policies and procedures in the workplace. Measuring the degree to which collective protests, rallies, and marches have influenced organizational actions can be complex due to the variance in activist practices and the resistance or amiableness of organizations to change. The Solution Protests, rallies, and marches can create a disruptive stage for challenging and confronting organizational policies and practices that maintain power structures. Through the examination of the literature and the review of recent worldwide events, this article illustrates how social movements have affected organizations and led to organizational changes, illuminating change processes in established fields such as business. Specifically, we aim to answer how protests, rallies, and marches influence organizational policies and practices attributed to human resource development (HRD). We conclude by discussing how a recent social movement is applicable to the field of HRD and suggest areas for future research. The Stakeholders This article may be of interest to employees at all levels of the organization, researchers, and practitioners in the field of HRD.

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