Managing Resistance to Organizational Change Essay

Resistance to change is an expected reaction of human nature. We are not accustomed to change, as it is possible to lead to failure; however, there are also ways to manage the resistance within the company.

This article discusses the pros and cons of advocating change within the workplace. It also discusses the reason (s) individuals are said to resist change because of habit and inertia, fear of the unknown, absence of the skills they will need after the change, and fear of losing power. OD approaches to organizational change presents a solid consensus that change and resistance can and should be "managed" by developing a strategy for change and using the OD tool kit of interventions such as training and communication programs, confrontation meetings, stakeholder

Change is difficult. Walking with people through change can be challenging and often draining. Bringing change, that persists is even harder. Most people resist even when they see the need for change and believe that it has to occur (p. 52).

Changes are very critical to enhance organizational effectiveness. An organization needs to implement changes to stay productive, competitive as well as avoiding calamity in the case of aviation sector. Changes are the process of instilling new attitudes, values, norms and behaviors within an organization to support the way of doing work. However, the implementation of changes is a task that requires adequate planning and design since changes are not always welcome and could lead to individual's resistance to change. (Agboola,& Salawu,2011). The identification

The reasons why I feel people may resist to change is because they are afraid, they are stuck in a routine, they don’t like the way the new change is or they just don’t understand it because it to different. People are sometime more resistant to change regardless because they are lazy and been doing something so long they don’t want to learn anything different. Also it because they are so use to doing things this one way for years they don’t understand why it must be done different. Change is always really scary to people that have been use to completing a task the same way. They are more afraid of making a mistake use this new way then they are with the old way. This fear happens because at least they are more understand of what they did wrong

Several instances exist where within an organization; changes take place regardless of the geographical position. These changes often encompass one or more individuals. In any case of a change taking place, people are likely to face abnormalities in their regular actions. A number of internal and external aspects also contribute much to this phenomenon as individuals resist change in their lives. Several instances exist where individuals portray resistance in terms of opposing change to them. This resistance in terms of change occurs because of lower tolerance level to change. This paper would take into account a number of significant aspects related to this resistance as far as change is concerned.

When properly utilized, resistance to change can actually facilitate it. Using resistance against itself is a strategy called “strategic self anti-conformity,” more commonly known as “reverse psychology.” This method involves significant risk as advocating against one’s own private interests has the potential to backfire. Effective use of reverse psychology requires deception, along with great certainty that the audience will resist, as planned (Nail, MacDonald, & Levy,

What are people attitudes when they are resistance to change? According to Zuwerink & Devine (1996) mentions that although there has been plenty of research done on persuasion, few have focused on the thoughts and behavior when resistance occurs (Zuwerink & Devine, 1996). Everything in our everyday life from TV, to radio, to the wide web prevail in using persuasion to affect the choices we make. In order to set a compass to understand and evaluate resistance to persuasion, we divide it the two processes of persuasion: peripheral route and central route. Zuwerink & Devine describe them as affective and cognitive processing (Zuwerink & Devine, 1996). In order to understand resistance, they had to think about what exactly is considered a strong

This paper investigates the relationship between irrational ideas, emotion and resistance to change. Nine organizations implementing major change were surveyed providing data from 615 respondents. The analysis showed that irrational ideas are positively correlated with behavioural intentions to resist change. Irrational ideas and emotion together explain 44 percent of the variance in intentions to resist. Also outlines an intervention strategy to guide management in developing a method for approaching resistance when implementing major change.

According to Palmer, Dunford, and Akin (2009) there are six different approaches to managing resistance to change which are, situational, let nature take its course, thought self-leadership, creative counters, tinkering, kludging, and pacing approach, and finally the power of resistance approach. While all of these different methods or approaches for dealing with change have positives and negatives, some are better than others. For example, Kotter and Schlesinger’s situational method is great in that it recognizes some situations need to be treated differently than others. However, they suggest that manipulation could be used and while they explain the dangers of this approach, its application is very limited and the rewards don’t outweigh the risks.

The focus of this paper is to discuss how “Resistance to change can be successfully overcome by systematically following John Kotter’s 8 step model of change management!” by utilizing relevant literature and discussing the model with referring to real case studies. The aim is to evaluate if the model can always succeed to overcome resistance to change. The last is made through a comparison between John Kotter’s 8 step model of change management and another approach to overcome resistance; which is by following the three phases Strebel’s personal compact theory suggests. To evaluate these models a

People often resist change based on fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of failure, disruption of interpersonal

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:

In order to improve in the area of resisting change, I must first realize that most organizations are not managed the way mine is. Due to budget cuts and layoffs over several years, the remaining staff are overworked and underpaid. My goal as an I/O professional is to implement changes that will improve organizations, but I will not be looking at only the bottom line. The stakeholders are just as important. The employees and clients must be considered more important than the bottom line because without them, you have no company. Although I cannot go into other organizations with a chip on my shoulder about employees

Employees resist change for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from a straightforward intellectual disagreement over facts to deep-seated psychological prejudices.