Challenges facing Saudi public sector leaders during change

Organization change management has a poor success record and confronts leaders with many challenges, including employee resistance. The Saudi public sector is undergoing widespread changes under the government’s reform agenda, Vision 2030. However, there is little research on organizational change in the Arab world; what exists locks depth and pays little attention to leaders’ roles. This paper explores the challenges facing Saudi public sector leaders and the response strategies adopted in two public sector organizations undergoing a recent change. Qualitative data were collected by unstructured interviews with six department leaders and 21 subordinates involved in change implementation. Challenges faced included the hierarchical organizational and sectoral structure, bureaucracy, high power distance, constraints on leaders’ autonomy, the gender-sensitive national culture, and employee resistance. Leaders employed a variety of strategies to cope with and mitigate these challenges, to achieve change success, notably, improving communication to explain the change, provide clarity and alleviate concerns. Leaders also become less authoritarian and more employee-focused, applying flexibility, providing opportunities for employee participation, and using various motivational strategies to gain employee commitment and improve productivity limitations of the study are the small convergence sample reflecting one project in one sector and the inability to follow change progress over time. The insight afforded by rich qualitative data on experienced challenges and leader behavior enables implications to be drawn for motivational strategies and communication with other public sector organizations involved in change projects.

AI invading the workplace: negative emotions towards the organizational use of personal virtual assistants

Personal virtual assistants (PVAs) based on artificial intelligence are frequently used in private contexts but have yet to find their way into the workplace. Regardless of their potential value for organizations, the relentless implementation of PVAs at the workplace is likely to run into employee resistance. To understand what motivates such resistance, it is necessary to investigate the primary motivators of human behavior, namely emotions. This paper uncovers emotions related to organizational PVA use, primarily focusing on threat emotions. To achieve our goal, we conducted an in-depth qualitative study, collecting data from 45 employees in focus-group discussions and individual interviews. We identified and categorized emotions according to the framework for classifying emotions Beaudry and Pinsonneault (2010) designed. Our results show that loss emotions, such as dissatisfaction and frustration, as well as deterrence emotions, such as fear and worry, constitute valuable cornerstones for the boundaries of organizational PVA use.

Using health-care technology to manage COVID-19 pandemic: a case of Al-Ain city hospital, UAE

Learning outcomes The teaching objectives of the case study will enable the students as follows: to recognise the challenges of information technology (IT) implementation in the health-care sector associated with employee resistance, to apply the technology acceptance model for analysing the degree of employee resistance, to relate the utilisation of Kotter’s 8-step change management approach in successful IT implementation in the health-care sector and maintenance of employee productivity and to classify the leadership traits reflected by the leaders in training the 600 diverse employee population of Al-Ain hospital. Case overview/synopsis The case highlighted the predicament the government-owned Al-Ain City Hospital, United Arab Emirates, faced following the surge in the incidences of COVID-19 in the country in March 2020. The hospital management decided to initiate the work-from-home arrangement as a non-pharmaceutical intervention of handling the spread of the disease amongst its employees. Fatima Almur, the Information Technology Director in Al-Ain Hospital, asked the Application Support Manager, Aysha Shahwan, to deploy some IT tools significant for remote support to patient care within two weeks. Shahwan faced significant challenges in deploying the IT tools in two weeks given the diverse workforce, with the majority of them having limited knowledge in operating the tools, and hence, their apprehension in the usefulness of the tools. Besides, Shahwan had to deploy some advanced tools for easy and secured access to the electronic health record, telemedicine and telecommuting using mobile phones, tablets or PCs. The deployment of these advanced tools would be jeopardised by employee acceptance and consequent dwindling productivity. Considering the issue of employee acceptance of the change and their limited knowledge, Shahwan had, therefore, to develop training frameworks to boost the former’s perceived usefulness and ease-of-use of the IT tools. Will Shahwan successfully deploy the advanced IT tools to enable the hospital staff, including medical staff and departments, to ensure efficient patient care from a remote location? Will she be able to train the 600 employees across genders, ages and knowledge, use the IT tools and safeguard them from common software threats like email phishing and ransomware? Will the hospital be able to sustain its vision of quality patient care using advanced technologies through this new arrangement of remote support amidst the pandemic when patients are more? Complexity academic level Undergraduate business management. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 10: Public sector management.

End users' resistance behaviour paradigm in pre-deployment stage of ERP systems: evidence from Bangladeshi manufacturing industry

PurposeThis study proposes a research model to identify the relevant constructs of employee resistance and symbolic adoption in pre-implementation stage of enterprise resource planning systems in manufacturing industries, drawing suitable support from the existing body of literature. The proposed model is a combination of the status quo bias theory and absorptive capacity theory to measure employee resistance that negatively lead to symbolic adoption of a user.Design/methodology/approachThis research used a self-administered questionnaire to survey 221 participants from five organizations in the manufacturing industry, all working towards deploying enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.FindingsThe results show that factors contributing to status quo bias and absorptive capacity impact end-user grumbling. Furthermore, end-user grumbling affects symbolic adoption substantially.Practical implicationsThis study provides researchers, practitioners and ERP vendors a broader overview of employees' resistance and motivation for using newly deployed systems.Originality/valueIn the past two decades, both practitioners and academicians are investigating the technical and non-technical features that assist end-users to adopt the system. Information system theories center on the post-deployment stage, with rare attempts to identify users' resistance and mental willingness to accept technology in the pre-adoption phase, which is very crucial for the success of ERP.

Organizational Change and the Imperatives of Managing Employee Resistance: A Conceptual Review

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to critically examine the factors that engender employee resistance to change and the various organizational strategies aimed at managing employee resistance to change. Methodology: The paper is a conceptual review of literature and thus adopted a desk research methodology to review extant literature on the subject matter. Findings: based on reviewed literature, managing and leading employees in a changing environment is critical to overall business success. A significant problem for many business leaders is that they fear employee resistance and do not use resistance as an opportunity to engage and learn. Unique Contribution: This study provides meaningful insight to the strategies needed to manage change which is seen as a permanent business function to improve efficiency and keep organizations adaptable to the competitive marketplace. Recommendation: Organizations must act in a proactive manner in managing incivility so that it does degenerate to serious and corrosive consequences that eat away the workplace culture by promoting well-being in the workplace and preventing certain unsafe dynamics from establishing themselves.

Communicate belonging? Duoethnography of an organisational change study

PurposeThis duoethnography explores feelings of belonging that emerged as being relevant to the participants of a doctoral organisational change study. It challenges the prolific change management models that inadvertently encourage anti-belonging.Design/methodology/approachA change management practitioner and her doctoral supervisor share their dialogic reflections and reflexivity on the case study to open new conversations and raise questions about how communicating belonging enhances practice. They draw on Ubuntu philosophy (Tutu, 1999) to enrich Pinar's currere (1975) for understandings of belonging, interconnectedness, humanity and transformation.FindingsThe authors show how dialogic practice in giving employees a voice, communicating honestly, using inclusive language and affirmation contribute to a stronger sense of belonging. Suppressing the need for belonging can deepen a communication shadow and create employee resistance and alienation. Sharing in each other's personal transformation, the authors assist others in better understanding the feelings of belonging in organisational change.Practical implicationsPractitioners will need to challenge change initiatives that ignore belonging. This requires thinking of people as relationships, rather than as numbers or costs, communicating dialogically, taking care with language in communicating changes and facilitating employees to be active participants where they feel supported.Originality/valueFor both practice and academy, this duoethnography highlights a need for greater humanity in change management practices. This requires increasing the awareness and understanding of an interconnectedness that lies at the essence of belonging or Ubuntu (Tutu, 1999).

Model for Causes Elimination of Staff Resistance to Innovative Change: evidence from Lithuanian Health Care Institutions

Frequent employee resistance to innovation is one of the main barriers of change failure in a health care organization and one of the negative stimuli of employment relationships. Identifying the reasons of resistance is a topical issue for every organization, as the speed of change can affect their competitiveness. Consequently, it is helpful not only to know the causes of potential resistance but also to be ready to control any implicit opposition. The organizational climate and the attitude of the staff play an important role in understanding and accepting innovation. Purpose of the study is to develop a model, which would facilitate the choice of an appropriate strategy necessary to enable the health care organization to eliminate or at least to reduce resistance to often essential innovative changes. The article analyses the root causes of resistance and identifies strategies that help to mitigate or eliminate staff resistance for innovation. Use of suggested model can make easier reducing staff resistance to change processes and thus speed up the implementation of innovations. This methodology can be used to eliminate the reasons for staff resistance to change in health care institutions of different countries, but it was tested in Lithuania and achieved good enough results.

Resistance to Organizational Change in Academia

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.

Resistance to (Digital) Change

Resistance 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.