OEC Handout # 5

Resistance to Change

People like
Comfort Zone
Stability
Predictability
Familiarity
Conventions
Status quo

People do not like
Change
Risk
Instability
Uncertainty

Both these factors have an impact on how people react to any change programme at a workplace.

More precisely, why people resist change?
Fear of Unknown
Fear of Failure
Disagreement on need for change
Losing something of value
False beliefs/Misunderstanding
Lack of Trust
Personality Conflicts
Peer pressure
Loss of status/job

Phases of Organizational Change
Organizational change causes individuals to experience a reaction process comprising four phases:
Initial Denial: Employees feel that chnage is not at all required in the company.
Resistance: Employees try to prevent the implementation of change programme
Gradual Exploration: Employees try to explore their role in the new scheme of things and start cooperating with the management
Eventual Commitment: Employees commit themselves to new way of doing things.Resistance is a natural and normal response to change because it involves going from known to unknown.

Conceptual Framework of Resistance to Change
Perception-Cognition-Affect-Resistance

Perception: Employees try to perceive the impact of change at this stage. The force or resistance is directly proportionate to the perceived impact of change on an individual.

Cognition: During organizational change, individuals create their own interpretations of what is going to happen, how they themselves are perceived, and what others are thinking or intending. Generally, peopel have a tendency to develop a negative self-schema about themselves and their life events (organizational change, for example). This results in cognitive distortions as they are not able to remain objective in the cognitive process.In case of any change programme, the employees construct irrational ideas as part of cognition.
Affect: Affective processes are usually operatinalized as emotions and feelings that are related to actions. Emotions in the context of organizational change can be described as a state of arousal involving facial and bodily changes, brain activation, sujective feelings, cognitive appraisals, which can be either conscious or unconscious, rational or irational. Psychologists have identified a number of primary emotions experienced by individuals universally such as fear, anger, sadness, joy surprise, disgust, contempt, etc.Organizational change generally leads to feelings of anger, denial, loss and frustration.Individuals experience loss and grief when estbalished ways of doing a job are changed. Changes and losses role identity can lead to feeling of anger, sadness, anxiety and low self-esteem.
Resistance: At this stage, the employees display physical actions that can be seen and heard. Moreover, it also includes mental process which cannot be seen or heard.So the employees may oppose, argue, obstruct, stall, dismantle and undermine a change effort. At the same time, they may withdraw, avoid or ignore the change efforts.How the companies respond to changeFailure of many corporate change programmes is often directly attributed to employee resistance. For example, a longitudinal study of 500 large organizations found that employee resistance was the most frequently cited problem encountered by management while implementing change. The study was conducted by Waldersee and Griffiths in 1997. More than half the organizations in that survey experienced difficulties with employee resistance.

Management usually focusses on the technical aspects of change with a tendency to neglect the equally important human element which is often crucial to the successful implementation of change.In order to successfully lead an organization through change, it is importnt for management to balance both technical and human aspects. Organizational change is driven by personal change. So engineering personal change should be tackled by the management with great care.