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Employees Actually Embrace Change: The Chimera of Resistance

2003; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2326-3709

Eric B. Dent, Edward H. Powley,

Management and Organizational Studies

Executive Summary The belief that people resist is widely held in organizational life. This paper will explore that belief in a number of ways. The phrase to change is unmasked by briefly deconstructing the term. A review of the literature suggests that there is no commonly held definition for resistance to fact, definitions range from willful opposition to valuable passion. To begin an effort at understanding in all its richness and depth, an exploratory study used interviews to reveal the fullness of how people experience at work. Six primary dimensions surfaced from 945 incidents analyzed. Reactions to varied considerably by dimension. Overall, interviewees made 1.9 positive statements about for every negative statement. The belief in resistance to may be not only inaccurate, but one which impedes the success of efforts. resist change. This belief is deeply ingrained in organizational life. It is inscribed in corporate documents, management textbooks, policy assumptions, executive training materials, consulting reports, and in societal media outside of organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore and unmask (Hacking, 1999) this belief, demonstrate that it is a poor metaphor for management, show that to change is not commonly defined in the literature, and offer the results of an exploratory empirical study which suggests that people may actually be more willing to embrace, rather than resist, Change is the only constant. This aphorism captures the dynamic of permanent white water (Vaill, 1991) commonly expressed in today's world of work. Yet, little work has been done to understand thoroughly the ways that people experience and interact with During any work day, someone has changes she is trying to make, changes she is required to address, and changes which are mutually causal - situations in which the person is simultaneously influencing and being influenced by the This paper will attempt to deal with only a portion ofthat terrain, the dynamics of resistance as it relates to A statement from Margaret Wheatley guides the exploration of to change in this article. A person in one organization said resistance to is like a mantra we feed ourselves: In every team meeting we get together and spend the first twenty minutes saying is hard. People resist change. This is an unexamined belief about human nature. Our assumptions about stability and the promises of equilibrium were all also promises and that is not how life is (Wheatley, in Maurer, 1996, p. 51). This paper will not be able to explore a belief about human nature broadly. What can be done here, though, is to determine how that belief has pervaded organizational functioning and to explore alternatives to holding this belief. Anyone who has worked in, or studied, organizations can testify to the poor track record of organizational efforts. A meta-analysis of large-scale efforts suggest that positive outcomes occur less than 40 percent of the time (Porras and Robertson, 1983). Kotier (1995) observed a decade of efforts and characterized a few as very successful, a few as utter failures, and the rest mostly toward the lower end of the scale. Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja (1997) report a Harvard Business School study which tracked the impact of efforts among the Fortune 100. Of the programs initiated between 1980 and 1995 (average expenditures exceeded one billion dollars per corporation), only 30% produced an improvement in bottom-line results that exceeded the company's cost of capital, and only 50% led to an improvement in market share price. another study, senior executives in Fortune 500 companies reported that less than one-half of the changes in their organizations were successful (Maurer, 1996). …