Importance Of Resistance To Change

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Recommended: Discuss the main sources of resistance to change as perceived by managers. Essays

Change and innovation is something that a business or organization is destined to adapt. Changes can occur from many reasons, either an expansion of a business (upsize) when good profit is being made or a contraction (downsize) when profits are down. Although changes may happen for the good of an organization, it may still affect the employees adversely. Employees may resist from various reasons like misunderstandings, self-interests or a general intolerance to any sort of change in their lives. This may happen to all sizes of businesses and these resistances to change issues must be addressed and avoided. Managers can develop strategies and techniques such as unfreezing, change intervention and refreezing. Educating misinformed employees about the need for change and communicate change-related information to them. Having employees affected by the change to participate in planning and implementing the change process. Have a discussion and agreement on who will do what after change occurs. And the resistance to change managed through coercion. (Williams & McWilliams 2014)

And now a little more on why there is a resistance to change in an organization and why it happens so habitually. Resistance to change is usually caused by self-interest, misunderstandings and distrust, and a normal intolerance for change. People resist change out of self-interest because they fear that the new change will consequence in a loss of pay, authority, responsibility or even perhaps one’s job. For example, the Associated Press (AP) is a news agency that employs over 10,000 journalists worldwide has recently changed its policy on employees’ use of social media. According to the new changed policy, any material on an employee’s Facebook site, even messa...

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...ished 70-year history of hand-drawing Hollywood’s most successful animated films (Snow White, Bambi, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast), animators at Walk Disney Company naturally resisted the move to computer-generated (CG) animation. So Disney supported the difficult change by putting all of its animators through a six-month ‘CG boot-camp’, where they learned how to ‘draw’ animated characters with computers. (Williams & McWilliams 2014)

Lastly, resistance to change can be managed through coercion, which is the use of formal power and authority to force others to change. Because of the intense negative reactions organizational change can create (e.g. fear, stress, resentment, sabotage of company’s products) coercion should be used only when a crisis exists or when all other attempts to reduce resistance to change have failed. (Williams & McWilliams 2014)

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