Managing Resistance to Change

Executive summary

Change is a way of life for those responsible for managing organizations and with change comes the discussion of resistance to change. Although the meaning of the phrase “resistance to change” is argued in the literature, the spectrum appears to range from genuine resistance to management's mislabeling of employee behavior as resistive that is merely not in agreement with the proposed changes. Resistance to change can generally be categorized as organizational or individual. Organizational resistance encompasses patterns of organizational behavior that undermine change and will not be discussed here.

Rather, this paper will focus on resistance to change. Change, positive or negative, is unsettling because people seek stability. Individuals often resist change; some resist more than others, and some situational characteristics (ex. trust in management) impact resistance to change. Experience and research support these statements, and many, intuitively at least; "know" what resistance to change "looks like". However, though a significant body of research exists that demonstrates that individuals resist change, there is little consensus about what resistance actually "is".

Research has demonstrated that resistance to change is dependent on both situational and dispositional factors. The focus of the current research is on increasing understanding of the dispositional dynamics of the resistance to change construct. While situational factors undoubtedly contribute to change responses, evidence exists that some individuals respond more negatively to change than do others, regardless of the type of change. Much of the existing change research has focused on responses to imposed changes, but individuals also resist initiating and completing self initiated change efforts, personally and professionally, even when change is desirable or necessary.

Though some researchers support either situational or dispositional explanations for individual behavior, others agree that the interaction of situational and dispositional factors accounts for variance in individual behaviors, such that more ambiguous and change-laden situations are most likely to evoke expressions of dispositional perceptions, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes. While global personality constructs may not be significantly useful for answering specific questions (ex. who will be satisfied at work; who will request feedback), assessment of "outcome specific dispositions" (House, et al, p.219), such as responses to change, may yield greater predictive ability. Multidisciplinary evidence points to individual variations in the tendency to resist change, and resistance is evoked by a variety of situations; however, the question of which individuals respond in what way to which change situations has not been adequately answered.

The manifestations of resistance responses within individuals and across situations must be understood to enable researchers and practitioners to determine which, if any, strategies most effectively reduce resistance, and if different strategies are more or less effective for particular resistance responses. A key goal in the study of resistance is to delineate individual responses to facilitate predictions of relevant criterion variables. Although research across and within disciplines has undertaken the study of resistance, there exists no clear consensus about what is actually meant by the construct, "resistance to change". In the study of individuals in organizations, for example, Pideret ...