Resistance to Organizational Change: Linking Research and Practices

Apart from the psychological dimension specifically those influencing individuals’ predisposition toward resistance to organizational change, he further found that change announcements can also affect individuals to resist change. This was resulted in individuals’ concerns about either their job security in the organization or their abilities to cope with the change. In this respect, the change message undoubtfully has been recognized as a potential factor to create negative restraining force to change resistance. () as ….. This kind of negative feelings was related to the cognitive reaction which has been discussed above. Individuals might feel uncertain whether those changes impact on their current situations, positions, job descriptions, benefits, or even power.
Besides, such an uncertainty involves when individuals feel lacking of capabilities to effectively deal with change specifically any change with new technologies, ….. (). In some cases, this is included the fear when individuals feel whether as change followers they can meet their supervisor or organization’s expectations or not.
Dennis G. Erwin also pointed out the importance of individuals’ attitudes that lead to resistance during the change implementation. In this regard, messages about change initiatives delivered to employees in the organization were strongly related to their openness or resistance to organizational change. On the other hand, his point from different findings was argued that individuals would resist change initiatives when they didn’t agree with those changes. In other words, information they received about changes did not matter for them whether to resist or open for changes.
More importantly, it is very useful here to consider managers’ attitudes toward change initiatives. In many cases, resistance to organizational change came from the managers themselves, according to the findings from those previous studies discussed in Erwin’s (2010). Those who did not clearly understand the change tended to resist it because they thought that change might not be successful and even did not want it happened. And this form of managerial attitudes could be shown through their negative behaviours toward change initiatives. This was then supported by another finding when managers felt negatively toward organizational change, it might be contradicted between the information and change policy they communicated to their subordinates. It can be said that the management inconsistency could influence employees’ uncertainty and resistance toward change implementation.