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Resistance to Change Essay

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Resistance to Change

Organizational change is the movement of an organization away from its present state and toward some desired future state to increase its effectiveness. (George et al, pg 567) Organizations need to change in the modern day market place. New technologies, globalization, foreign trade, investments and constantly shifting marketplaces demand the need for flexibility, adaptation, and change. The downside to this is in an organizations employees. People by nature resist change. In a workplace environment, where familiarity is present with an employees set of tasks and processes, change becomes more difficult to introduce and accept. There are basically three groups associated with a resistance to change. They are on an …show more content…

People who work in highly mechanistic structures are more resistant to change due to the expectation of performing tasks and duties in specific ways and so do not develop the initiative to adjust their behavior to changing conditions. This in turn causes the group to resist any changes in the norm. Organizational culture is another resistance to change. Because an organizations norms and values causes people to react and operate in predictable ways, any disruption to these patterns of norms may cause people to be resistant to the changes. At a group level, there are group norms which are strong informal norms that specify appropriate and inappropriate behaviors and govern interactions between group members. Change will inevitably alter these sets of informal norms. Group cohesiveness although beneficial to an organization, can sometimes impede the necessity for change within an organization. The reason is the group will unite to protect its status quo and protect its own interests at the expense of other groups. Finally groupthink, which is the discounting of negative information within a group in order to agree, and escalation of commitment, which the continued pursuit of an action even though the group realizes its decision was wrong, will greatly cause resistance to change. This is due to the difficulty in changing the groups

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