Whenever an individual surrogate their comfort zone, it jeopardizes them, and this uneasiness is depicted in their emotions, cognitive thinking and behavioral aspects (Oreg, 2003) which they generally juxtapose as a resistance. Resistance to change could be constructive as well as detrimental to an organization. Usually, they inbred from the environment and organization cultures whereas some are interpersonal profoundly raised due to being self-conscious. Change manager should be proactive in analyzing the resistance and consider it to be a part of the organizational process.
Organization adopting for too much change in a bid to maintain competitiveness, may boredom and frustrate employees. This mechanization approach of continuous change model without a lead time in-between shall demotivate the employees. As stated by (Bruch & Menges, 2010) the increased number of the pace of change may not only overstress and overload the employee but also may create acceleration trap in the organization. Whereas some employees hold the predisposition about the change, making them rigid and negative, but if the right amount of information is provided along with favorable organizational context, we can motivate them for change. For example, International Monetary Fund(IMF) during downsizing created favorable organizational context by supporting leaving employees through voluntary retirement scheme, reallocation, and coordination with sister organizations (United Nations and the World Bank) to prioritize ex-IMF-ers be treated as internal staff and give preference in applying for jobs (Hewlett, 2009). Here the resistance was alleviated by changing employee disposition about downsizing and layoff through positive organizational context.
Some peoples due to their risk-averse personality resist change; by nature, their low affinity to change and lack of interest in the subject matter inclined them for resistance. People with strong emotions generally can adapt to changes whereas emotionally weak people hardly handle the change. Further, the discrepancy in the expectation of reciprocity, termed as in psychological contract leads to create resistance in an employee (Palmer, Dunford, & Buchanan, 2016). Generally, employee expects to get the same amount of rewards back from the organization as the way of their hard work, but these seldom happens, it creates low trust relationship which negatively impacts the change process.
In times, people’s resist to change thinking the timing is wrong and are bound by their previous arrogance of the success (Sull, 1999) actually; this leads to acceleration trap. The inability of Marissa Mayer to proactively predict and manage the change jeopardizes the company and later sold yahoo.com in significantly lower value than previously awarded. The failure of yahoo.com to change could be related with factors like lack of competence, low level of trust, lack of consultation, poor communication, lack of conviction that the change is necessary, lack of clarity as to what is expected.
The conflict of interest between the employee and organization hurdles the change. If company’s objective is to restructure it to lean organization structure than it could impact the job tenure security of the employees and resistance may appear. The legacy from the previous culture and records could be impactful if the previous situation of changes in the organization were turmoil than people often resist. Moreover, power and politics could be the cause of resistance. Basically, unionization and labor unions, the management team of my friend's company is currently negotiating with the trade unions, and the restructuring process has been in halt since a year. Culture, a shared value, beliefs, norms have also direct impact in an organizational environment, a strong culture with supportive and learning environment supports change. Due to the week corporate culture of some companies, implementing change has always been a tough task. A cold war between Taxi service and Uber could be an example where traditional cabs were not able to change itself to the convenience and time saving as expected by its customers.
To conclude, if the change is in the interest of employee if change creates a favorable situation it is supported else resisted, but the change manager should take the resistance as a norm of daily business activities and try to channelize the resistance into the success of the company.
Bibliography
Bruch, H., & Menges, J. I. (2010). The acceleration trap. Harvard Business Review, 80-86.
Hewlett, S. A. (2009). Downsizing the Right Way. Harvard Business Review.
Oreg, S. (2003). Resistance to change: Developing an individual differences measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4):680-93.
Palmer, I., Dunford, R., & Buchanan, D. A. (2016). Managing Organizational Change A Multiple Perspective Approach. MC GrawHill Education.
Sull, D. N. (1999). Why do companies go bad? Harvard Business Review, 42-52.
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