Resistance to Change in the Workplace

Resistance to Change in the Workplace

Introduction

The act of struggling or opposing with the transformation or modifications that alter the status quo in the workplace is known as resistance of change. Resistance to change can be overt, covert, individual or organized. Most people do not like to change and they resist to change because they fear to lose something they value, fear to unknown, do not understand the change and its implication, or do not want to leave their comfort zone. The reason varies from person to person. Resistance to change emerges when they feel threat to their values. This threat can be just a perception or may be real (Duck, 1993, 109). The speed of innovation adoption is affected because of resistance. Resistance to change affects the opinions and feelings of employees at all stages of adoption process because of which relationships, productivity, and quality is affected. It is very challenging to manage resistance to change. One of the great challenges in leadership is to foster and manage changes because most of people at workplace resist changing because of bureaucracy, culture and other various factors (Edward, 2007, 2).

In general, resistance to change is inevitable, but the strength of resistance to change may vary from organization to organization. As such, a key role of leaders is to reduce the resistance to change and get employees adapt and accept the change. This paper will evaluate the reasons and consequences behind resistance to change in the workplace as well as the general principles of managing change in the workplace. The paper will argue that reverse planning is the most effective method to tackle resistance to change in the workplace. In addition in this paper, I am going to share my experience in managing change with the help of reverse planning. In recent years, many authors have written about the reaction o army people to change. Thus this paper is further going help readers in understanding and managing the change effectively specifically in military as this paper is focused on managing resistance to change in military.

Brief Background

Most goals I set for myself in the military started from where I was at the time, physically and then attempted to go forward to a specified objective. For example when I was asked to conduct physical exercises for my small group within my Army unit, I made good use of reverse planning. My first step was to identify the goal (end-state); in this case I was required to provide useful training that would improve the groups' teamwork while at the same time having fun to relieve them of the monotonous prescribed regiment of day to day set pattern of exercises. With this goal in mind as my overall objective I moved on to creating a written plan for the week that would follow path towards a meaningful bonding experience.

Second I figured out the small teamwork tasks to be included in the plan that would get me to reach the ...