Employees in most organisations have to endure change on a regular basis. at the same time, it is accepted that people resist change? is resistance inevitable and if so, elucidate how can it most appropriately be handled?
905 mots
4 pages
An organisational change occurs when there is a move from one position to another (Ford and Ford, 1995 cited in Rollinson, 2008, p630). The need for change can be provoked by many different triggers either internal or external. Nowadays, organisations need to make radical changes whereas it used to be only incremental alterations in the past (Peters, 1987 cited in Rollinson, 2008, p630). For this reason, organisational survival will essentially depend on their ability to handle the change process (Kanter, 1995 cited in Rollinson, 2008, p630) and mainly employees’ resistance (O’Connor 1993). First we will try to try to identify why change is resisted and finally we will look at the tactics which can be used to overcome it.Organisations are formed by individuals and that is why it is difficult to change the organisation without involving individual change (Band, 1995 in Bovey and Hede) although this may be true, managers still look in a technical point without involving, recognising the human importance (Arendt et al., 1995 cited in Bovey and Hede, 2001, p 535). People perceived change as a threat because it implies destruction of the familiar (Coghlan et al., 1993 in Bovey and Hede, 2001, p 534).
Resistance may be related to the stability of the organisation structure because it has “in-built streak of conservatism” (Hall, 1987 cited in Rollinson, 2008, p637). However, resistance is mostly an individual level phenomenon and Bedeian and Zammuto (1991, cited in Rollinson, 2008, p639) propose four main reasons. One of them is that we seek to keep and protect our status quo with which we are happy, naturally it required time to build it. Another point is that incomplete and distorted information about the change result in uncertainty, rumours (Buchanan et al, 1994 cited in Van Dam et al, 2008, p 328). Uncertainty is classically about the impacts for the individual employee (Buono and Bowditch, 1993 cited in Elving, 2005, p132). For instance, job insecurity is one