Resistance to Change

What do you do when you become the CEO of an organization that lost over 30 million dollars and over a million customers in the last calendar year? Well, if you’re Dan Hesse you compare the need to change with Sir Earnest Shackleton’s epic quest to be the first to make it to the South Pole. While his quest to fix a corporation is not life or death risky, it is fraught with perils of trying to change the way a company operates. Changing the organizational behavior means changing employee behavior. How management goes about changing the behavior of the employees can mean the difference between success and failure or the organization.

Change and adaptability are part of daily life, yet when we go to work change is often viewed as a negative and should be resisted. Psychologists have been studying resistance to change on an organizational level for decades. How change is presented to us has a bearing on our resistance to it. Two journal articles written within the last six months explore several hypotheses for why change is sometimes resisted and other times welcomed. The main focus of both journal articles is on the leader-member exchange (LMX) relationship and its affects on change. Resistance to change manifests itself in many ways. One of the bigger obstacles to change is that people within the organization have different goals than that of the organization. Let’s face it; an organization does not have career or retirement type of goals. When an organization needs to change it is management’s job to influence employees to direct their efforts to the organizational goals. An organization may need to change and the employees may see that the organization is not doing well yet still resist changing. These problems can be categorized three different ways. When people have negative interpretations of change then the resistance is of the Cognitive state variety. Becoming agitated, anxious, or depressed are emotional ways to resist change. The behavior element...