This paper examines organizational resistance to change from multiple angles, challenging the conventional view that change recipients are solely responsible for resistance. It explores how change agents themselves contribute to resistance through broken agreements, communication failures, and dismissiveness toward recipient input. The paper also considers how resistance can be reframed as a positive organizational resource. Drawing on Ford, Ford, and D'Amelio (2008) and Kotter's (1995) eight-step change model, the paper critiques traditional approaches to overcoming resistance and outlines practical strategies managers can use to initiate and sustain successful organizational change.
Various analyses of resistance to change tend to adopt the perspective that change agents are usually doing the right thing while recipients establish unreasonable barriers to hinder the occurrence of change. Consequently, change agents tend to be viewed as undeserving victims of the dysfunctional and absurd reactions of change recipients. Rather than being viewed as people who shape their environments and realities, change agents are typically cast as individuals who must overcome objective resistance from recipients. In most cases, resistance to change is never depicted as the outcome of balanced, coherent strategies and objectives.
Resistance to change does not occur as a sudden or direct reaction to a specific instance of change; rather, it emerges as a product of the interactions between change agents and change recipients. While this resistance can be used by change agents as a positive factor, agents can also contribute to it through their actions, behaviors, and inaction. The likelihood that recipients will embrace or resist change is partly determined by what change agents do.
The first way change agents contribute to resistance is through actions that violate agreements during the change process and through failing to restore the resulting loss of trust (Ford, Ford & D'Amelio, 2008). These agreements typically take the form of either psychological or implied contracts and can be violated either knowingly or unknowingly. Violations occur when there are shifts in the distribution of resources, processes, and procedures. For instance, change recipients are likely to resist change when they have not received the promised financial incentives or job promotions associated with the change process. As a result, these individuals may exhibit negative behaviors such as lower morale, reduced productivity, and declining quality of work.
The second way change agents contribute to resistance is through communication breakdowns with change recipients. This occurs when change agents fail to legitimize the change, fail to motivate employees to action, or misrepresent the likelihood of the change succeeding. While the failure to legitimize change and misrepresentation of its probability of success lead to lower employee morale, the failure to motivate people to action contributes to lower productivity. People are generally more likely to resist change when they are not actively involved throughout the entire change process.
The third way change agents contribute to resistance is by dismissing ideas, proposals, and alternatives put forward by change recipients. Though this dynamic is often overlooked by proponents of conventional approaches, change agents contribute to resistance when they become defensive and coercive toward recipients. For example, people are likely to resist change when their concerns about undesirable performance impacts or unexpected budget overruns are consistently ignored by the change agents.
While traditional approaches have categorized resistance to change as something to be conquered — and its instigators as unreasonable — resistance can also serve as a positive resource for an organization. However, one of the major pitfalls of the conventional, self-serving approach is that it is likely to obscure the incompetence and mismanagement of the change process by agents ("Change Agents," 2007). Whenever change agents encounter resistance, they have an opportunity to leverage it constructively through various strategies.
As proposed in the relevant literature, some of the ways to use change resistance as a positive resource include introducing new conversations and patterns for discourse, engaging people through paradoxical interventions, and adopting practices that strengthen change. Resistance can be useful because it helps sustain conversations — an essential element in any change process. Change agents can also use resistance productively by identifying a specific target for it, channeling the energy of opposition to promote a desired change. Resistance to change can likewise be treated as a functional expression of recipients' commitments to strengthening the change effort itself.
"Evaluating limits of conventional change frameworks"
"Managerial errors and Kotter's eight corrective steps"
Many studies on change resistance focus on analyzing the reasons why recipients resist change while ignoring the actions of change agents. Consequently, descriptions of resistance to change tend to obscure the underlying dynamics between change agents and recipients. A more complete understanding requires attending to both sides of the change relationship, recognizing that agents themselves play a significant role in generating or mitigating resistance. The frameworks offered by Ford, Ford, and D'Amelio (2008) and Kotter (1995) together provide a useful foundation for this more balanced and actionable approach to organizational change.
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