How Striking Are Employees?

Many types of risk are created – risk to the project, to the organization, to the employees involved and to the individuals supporting the change.

As a result, Zwick (2002, p. 542) has noted that implementing change programmes in organisations that realise positive outcomes remain problematic for many organisations in the 21st century. Ayodeji & Oyesola (2011, p. 235) have postulated that organisational change is a dynamic process, which when taken poorly contribute to employee resistance to it, and eventually leads to failure of the whole process. 3|Page Organisation Behaviour; MGTS 1601; Individual Essay; Employee resistance to change Yuanli Zhang 43401163 Employees resist changes when they occur in the organisations for several reasons. Many organisations when they introduce changes are likely to stick to the ‘top-down organisational change’ process (Awasthy, Chandrasekaran & Gupta, 2011, pp.

Organizations must respond to their internal and external environment. Therefore, organizational success heavily relies on leaderships ability to manage change. Unfortunately, many leaders struggle to effectively lead change initiatives. In fact, Ashkenas (2013, para. 1) reported 60 – 70% of organizational change initiatives fail to meet their objectives.

Today was the first time in months I had a flashback of the wartime. The strike was nothing like I imagined. We held a parade to protest the mayor’s actions, firing civic workers, arresting strike leaders and appointing special police to control the strikers. All of a sudden, some people in front of us overturned a streetcar and started to set it on fire. I already knew we were in big trouble. As the smoke from the car raised, the NWMP armed with clubs and pistols charged the crowd. Many were being arrested as well. This strike was no longer peaceful. Everyone rushed to get away from the police, others stayed there to show their rage. I had rushed to home as soon as possible. All I could remember was a 40 year old male getting beat

Week 3, the lecture on Managing Change describes organizational changes that occur when a company makes a shift from its current state to some preferred future state. Managing organizational change is the process of planning and implementing change in organizations in such a way as to decrease employee resistance and cost to the organization while concurrently expanding the effectiveness of the change effort. Today's business environment requires companies to undergo changes almost constantly if they are to remain competitive. Students of organizational change identify areas of change in order to analyze them. A manager trying to implement a change, no matter how small, should expect to encounter some resistance from within the organization.

The impact to change or resistance to change will have influence by the forces, motivations and even attitudes that employees or groups have towards the change. Change is inevitable, however our willingness to change the status quo is determined by these driving forces. Leadership, management and employees will have ups and downs as they move thru the different change models steps, however, communication along with understanding of emotions, attitudes and past experiences are going to impact the success of the change in process or structure.

Individuals when faced with any major change will be inevitably resistant and will want to preserve the status quo, especially if they think their status or security within the organization is in danger (Bolognese, 2010). Folger and Skarlicki believe that organizational change produces skepticism in employees which make it problematic and possibly even impossible to contrive improvements within the organization (as cited in Bolognese, 2010) Therefore, management must understand, accept and make an effort to work with resistance, since it can undermine even the most well-conceived change efforts (Bolognese, 2010). Furthermore, Coetsee states for organizations to achieve the maximum benefits from change they must effectively create and

1.1 Change management is described by Armstrong (1) as “the process of achieving the smooth implementation of change by planning and introducing it systematically taking into account the likelihood of it being resisted”. Change, the fundamental constant in any successful organisation, can be adaptive, reconstructive, revolutionary or evolutionary and can happen for a number of diverse reasons:

Bolognese, A. (2002). Employee Resistance to Organizational Change. Retrieved December 2, 2006 from Internet, http://www.newfoundations.com/OrgTheory/

Poorly managed organizational change can increase risk, budgets and damage reputations. Organizational change typically educes strong emotions because change interferes with the sense of security, as well as produces feelings of uncertainty (Barabasz, 2016). Employee’s reactions to imposed change, which can range from high turnover, low morale, an assiduous reduction in productivity, to wildcat or other strikes, perplexes many leaders. Leadership that develops strategies to manage the active and passive resistance can mitigate risk and minimize additional costs. In this paper, I will discuss a case study that focuses on how employee resistance to a poorly managed change

To identify the key elements of the resistanceto change described in this situation, one may make use of the six Change Approaches of Kotter and Schlesinger.[1]The model prevents, minimizes or descreases resistance to change in organizations. According to Kotter and Schlesinger (1979), there are four reasons that why people resist change, three of which are applicable to this case:

Time and communication are the two keys to success for the changes to occur. People need time to understand the changes and they also need to feel highly connected to the organization throughout the transition period. When you are managing change, this can require a great deal of time and effort and hands-on management is usually the best approach.

Bemmels and Reshef (1991) understand it as any employee actions attempting to stop or delay change. Obviously being viewed as adversarial and detrimental, resistance to change has gained a negative connotation (Waddell and Sohal, 1998) that allegedly confounded the problem of effecting change by promulgating a dichotomous thinking of labour versus management (Dent and Goldberg, 1999). Recently, an appreciation of resistance to change from a more pluralistic employee-centred perspective and its role in organizational change (Waddell and Sohal, 1998) has lead to the resistance to change interpretation from a psychological point of view (Conner, 1998), as a natural outcome of people 's internal defence mechanism (Bovey and Hede, 2001), or background conversations among employees that constitute the constructed reality (Ford, Ford, & McNamara, 2002). Paterson and Hartel (2000) interpreted resistance to change as a people 's cognition and affect or the perceived organizational justice done, while Rousseau (1989), McLean Parks and Kidder (1994) find it significantly related with the violation of the employment psychological contract. Resistance to change may be categorized into three groups of factors (Mabin, Forgeson & Green, 2001): organizational, group and individual. Organizational factors are caused by threats presented by unknown or unwelcome organizational structure and process change and threats induced by the environment inside or outside of the organization.

In contrast, if the transformational initiative is carried out by change agents with whom employees are used to relate and with whom employees have developed certain customary work relationships, then the workers will be willing to help with implementing the change, will not display resistance, and will be open to more change. The fact that people tend to resist the change in human relationships and not the technical change was observed and confirmed by the above mentioned study as well as numerous others. If participation in change will be perceived by employees as a continuation or part of a normal, day-to-day behavior, then there will be no resistance.

The works of Khan (1989), Jreisat (1988), and Khassawneh (2005) carried out in different time periods, which is about 17 years. Nevertheless, there are similarities research findings about the reasons that led to the employee refuses to change, namely the lack of commitment of the leadership in making changes. This work has provided insight into some of the research questions on the causes of resistance, so it is considered relevant to this dissertation.