Employee Resistance Towards Organizational Change

Employee Resistance towards Organizational Change

The globalization era and rapid evolution of technologies, which have created more opportunities for more growth and revenue, lead to need to organizational change. Organizational change can be defined as leading human workforce to a different path than what they are adapted to or accustomed to. Organizational change happen for reasons like to better meet its goals and more specifically, to grow. Resistance by definition means a refusal to accept or comply with something. Here, in this article, the focus is on driving forces which cause resistance to organizational change and how should an organization help itself to lessen this resistance.

Formally, Organizational change is known as the movement of an organization away from its present state and toward some desired future state to increase its effectiveness (Lunenburg, NUMBER 4, 2010). Changes in business must be for the purpose of improvement. Matching the steps with innovative technologies improves the efficiency and also increases satisfaction of customer demands. Changes in organization can be seen in various segments. For small business, this change occurs when it succeeds and grows. The roles and responsibilities tend to increase as company expands. Searching a process that makes sense and fits the business' current needs as per technology transformation is what organization re-examines regularly. Unavoidable or external forces like company's environment change can lead to major change in terms of bu siness processes. Sometimes it may happen that to deliver a high value to customer a senior manager or owner makes necessary changes in organization's values like ethics, attitudes, transparency, consistency etc. This shows how an organization can or are bound to make changes to deliver better products, finer services or reputable values.

Resistance can be defined variously by different authors. But the concept remains the same. Resistance basically is a behaviour which is intended to safeguard a person from actual or imagined threats of the change to an established status quo. A quote by Peter Senge "People don't resist change. They resist being changed!" explains it all. People refuse changes because they fear about failure. Structural and cultural change creates or raises doubts about the capabilities of one. This ultimately reduces the self-confidence