Individual Resistance to Organizational Change
Introduction
Effective and efficient change management is critical to the continued organizational success. Initiation and effective management of planned organizational changes remains one of the most important aspects of strategic management, but despite the existence of a wealth of empirical and theoretical information on organizational change, the rate of success for such initiatives remains dismal. According to Kotter (2007), upwards of 80% of organizational change initiatives end in failure, with an estimated 50% of such plans collapsing before the actual implementation stage. Erwin & Garman (2010) observes that less than 38% of planned organizational change initiatives were successful, while only 30% of the changes resulted in meaningful and sustained improvements in the respective organizations. The consequence of failure is considerable, including but not limited to loss of competitiveness, reduced profitability, and complete failure. Resistance to change remains a central issue facing change managers and agents. Despite there being a measure of finality about this fact, theoretical and empirical research into the multifaceted nature of human resistance to change remains inconclusive. This is in part because of the difficulties in conceptualizing resistance to change and also because there appears to be little effort to study different forms of resistance to change (Szabla, 2007; Sarayreh, Khudair, & Barakat, 2013; By, 2005). Even most importantly, there appears to be an excessive emphasis on employees as a whole, as against individual, organizational members. This paper focuses on the individual resistance to change, including its nature, causes and strategies that can be employed by organizations to combat it.
What factors cause individual resistance to organizational change initiatives?
What strategies can organizations use to reduce individual resistance to organizational change initiatives?
Individual Resistance to Organizational Change
According Bovey & Hede (2001), a successful change management strategy must include a correct balance between individual and organizational variables. While many organizations tend to over-emphasize or even only focus on the technical/organizational aspects of change, such approaches alienate organizational members, who feel little sense of responsibility and ownership of the changes. It is only natural that unless there is a clear and impending threat to the organization, most of its members prefer continuity and stability to uncertainty. Everett Roger’s technological diffusion theory takes this reality into due consideration, asserting that fo changes to succeed, they must be relevant and perceived/actually beneficial to then individuals. Rogers (2003) and Karreman & Alvesson (2009) asserts that resistance to innovations results from the complexity of the proposed changes, poor clarity of the vision, uncertainty, possible threats to power, too many and expected changes, incompetence, poor previous experiences with change implementations and early signs of failure.
Bovey & Hede (2001) argues that employees undergo reactions as a consequence of the change, with which they deal differently. They undergo initial denial, resistance, and gradual acceptance, before finally committing to changes, which is why organizations must not only allow this to occur, but also foster the transition towards the full commitment to change. Organizational members are susceptible to irrational ideas, emotional difficulties, and resistance. At an individual level, the perceived impact of change depends on the degree, the perceived impact of change depends on the degree of control they have over it, with low control often leading to resistance, but the process is mediated by cognition (irrational ideas) and affect (emotions). The study surveyed 615 respondents drawn from nine organizations implementing change. The results reveal a positive correlation between irrational ideas about change, and the organizational members’ tendency to resist them. Irrational ideas accounted for up to 44% of the variance in the tendency to resist change. The polarized thought is expected, and negativity creates a pessimistic mental schema that ultimately leads to failure.
Individual reactions to organizational changes may be either supportive or antagonistic, In a study to determine ways for change managers to address individual resistance to change, Erwin & Garman (2010) reviewed scholarly research reports published after 1998 and focusing on individual resistance to change. The results indicate that behaviors, feelings nd thoughts about resistance are never bad or wrong, but negative or positive. The behavioral dimension of resistance includes mostly passive conduct that is for or against proposed organizational change that impedes or slows down the attainment of change goals. These behaviors (negative/positive) terminate, slow down or make the change effort difficult. On the other hand, affective/cognitive dimensions to resistance involves deeper issues pertaining to the conceptualization of change. Negative cognitive attitudes or reactions to proposed changes include anxiety, anger, fear, stress, apprehension, fear, and elation. Individuals experience the affective, behavioral and cognitive dimensions simultaneously. Further, these reactions are influenced by personality differences, risk tolerance, defense mechanisms, perceived change impact, irrationality, self-concept and personal capacity to cope with changes. Individual considerations of the perceived or actual benefits and threats of proposed changes, involvement in the implementation, communication, level of trust in the management, influence of change agents and managerial styles also play a central role. Effectively, Erwin & Garman (2010) provides possible explanation for the variation in reactions to change, and thus implies possible strategies to mitigate them, but the methodology renders its validity in some question given the fact that the study heavily relied on studies that used self-reported questionnaires and quantitative analysis.
Szabla (2007) employs a causal-comparative research design to study the relationship between unionized employees of a local government in the US perceived the acquisition of an automated performance appraisal process, as well as their reactions to proposed organizational changes. The study categorized respondents into three groups according to their respective perceptions of the change implementation process i.e. normative-reductive, power-coercive and rational-empirical. Several covariance analyzes to measure the emotional, intentional and cognitive response differences across the three employee groups. The results show a statistically significant relationship between the perceived planned organizational change leadership strategy and the reactions to change along the emotional, intentional and cognitive dimensions. Normative-reductive and rational-empirical change leadership strategy lead to positive responses across the three dimensions while perceived power-coercive strategy led to ambivalence across the three dimensions. Effectively, in common with Bovey & Hede (2001) and Erwin & Garman (2010), Szabla (2007) finds the existence of a relationship between the organizational members’ perception of the strategies used to implement change and the manner in which individuals reacted to change.
Meier, Ben, & Schuppan (2013) comes to a conclusion anticipated by Rogers (2003) i.e. a perceived loss of power or control is an important determinant of individual responses to change. In a study to identify the employees’ attitudes to the adoption of information technology in public sector organizations. The model that is traditionally employed in such transformation i.e. the Model of Acceptance of Technical Tools (TAM) dwells on technical capability as against the employees possible resistance and other non-technical reasons for failure. This, according to Bovey & Hede (2001), should heighten the possibility of failure. This study found that other than the technical factors, employee fear of losing their work autonomy/discretion, social influence and perception of information quality significantly influenced the resistance to change. Other than suggesting the importance of social aspects of organizational change initiatives, this paper makes no specific recommendations as to the strategies that can be used by the organization to mitigate individual resistance.
Shao-Hsi, Ying-Fang, & Shao-Wen (2012) does further than Erwin & Garman (2010) and other similar studies, by investigating the association between three cognitive personality types of organizational members and three resistance variables. The three cognitive personality types are insight, self-reflection, and flexibility while the resistance variables include cognitive resistance, behavioral resistance, and affective resistance. Using a sample of 419 respondents drawn from large manufacturing organizations in Taiwan that had undergone major organizational change, the study explored the link between cognitive flexibility and perception of change. The findings showed that both self-reflection and insight were antecedent to cognitive flexibility. Cognitive and affective resistance to change was positively associated with behavioral resistance while cognitive resistance was positively associated with affective resistance. Even most importantly, cognitive flexibility was shown to be negatively related to all the variables of change resistance. While this study suffers from the fact that both the independent and dependent variables were gathered from the participants, effectively rendering the results vulnerable to common method variance, it points to the existence of a strategically important relationship between personal factors and the success of organizational change.
Strategies to Mitigate Individual Resistance
Rogers, (2003)’s model for ensuring that innovations are adopted requires that the proposed changes exhibit five critical aspects. First, it must be demonstrated that the changes have a relative advantage over the status quo. Further, the changes should be compatible with current values/system, must be simple, capable of being tried, and should have observable short-term goals that would serve to encourage organizational members to fully adopt the changes. More recent change management also plans tend to build into consideration the need for engagement of stakeholders, but without reference to individual, organizational members. For instance, Kotter’s eight-step change management model, the plan commences with the creation of a sense of urgency, establishment of a leading coalition of influential stakeholders, development a clear strategic vision (as well as initiatives), enlist volunteer armies of first adopters, generate medium-term wins, sustain the changes and then institutionalize the gains made. While this is also a macro model since it deals with the organization as a whole, it is possible to envisage the engagement of stakeholders at an individual level, in order to overcome the behavioural, affective and cognitive difficulties with proposed changes and implementation (Szabla, 2007; Klein, 1996).
In order to counter the tendency for individuals to resist change, Bovey & Hede (2001) suggests that organizational members need to assume a sense of responsibility, take more risks and experiment. The irrational influences stem from the inability or failure of individuals to seize control of their destiny, and instead try to change other people’s minds and actions. They are convinced that the source of their problems is external, and thus the anger and frustration. Effectively, change agents need to be alive to the human cognitive and behavioral processes and intervene. Personal interventions include full acknowledgement of responsibility for own behaviours and emotions, acceptance of control over their emotions/behaviour, recognition of the influence of irrationality on their conduct and feelings, become alive to their own irrationalities and actively challenge then, and work hard in order to confront the dysfunctional thought processes. Obviously, it is not pragmatic for an organization to bet the success of changes on the employees’ emotional and behavioral conditions, but it can facilitate the changes through a variety of measures. A positive and proactive organizational culture is critical to ensure that all organizational members by similar motivations, ideas, vision/mission, and values, etc. Organizational culture includes structure, leadership, historical heritage, vision/mission, and communication channels, etc. Assessment of the emotions, beliefs and intentions, it is possible for practitioners to come up with skills that can comprehensively address barriers to trade. Change strategies, should, for a start, avoid coercion and manipulative use of power to ensure compliance.
According to Shao-Hsi, Ying-Fang, & Shao-Wen (2012), effective management of organizational members’ resistance to change depends on a minimization of behavioral resistance, induced by both cognitive and affective resistance. As such, prior to, and during any organizational changes, change agents and managers must pay close attention to the employees’ feelings, especially by communicating effectively to reduce the urge to resist change. Since cognitive flexibility impacts the tendency to resist change and both insight and self-reflection influence cognitive flexibility, and then it is in the interest of organizations to ensure that organizational members have these two qualities. This can be attained by recruiting employees who are reflective and insightful, and/or can be inculcated using carefully crafted organizational culture (Shao-Hsi, Ying-Fang, & Shao-Wen, 2012; Balthazard, Cooke, & Porter, 2009). Nearly all change management models e.g. the Force Field Model, Kotter’s eight-step model and Lewin’s model lay emphasis on constant communication and engagement with stakeholders in ensuring that resistance to change is minimized. However, given the individual diversity of organizational members, it is not clear whether organizational level strategies can address the individual reservations that members have about planned changes.
Conclusion
It is evident in the paper that while employee resistance to planned organizational change is critical, there is a failure to address the individual factors more aggressively in implementing changes. This may just hold the key to tackling the high failure rates that categorize organizational change initiatives. However, members of an organization come from diverse backgrounds, have different personality types and other personal circumstances, which make it almost likely that some members will be unhappy with planned changes. This is even more emphasized by large organizations, which have thousands of employees. It is understandable that addressing every individual, organizational member’s needs is not practical or even feasible, but specific strategies exist that can achieve nearly helpful outcomes. However, by modifying existent change implementation models to incorporate more intense communication and engagement with stakeholders is critical to ensuring that individual reservations about organizational changes are allayed, and replaced with support/optimism (Szabla, 2007; Klein, 1996).
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