Sunday, January 09, 2005

Resistance to Change


Flexibility and adaptability are essential to survival and growth in the 21st century. In order to successfully navigate in an unpredictable world, individuals, groups, and organizations alike need to be agile and take risks. According to Schermerhorn et al, “people in the new workplace must be comfortable dealing with adaptation and change.’ (P398). People have a great capacity to change if they are guided in a helpful and understanding way. Learning to do things differently is not easy and pulls people out of an unconscious competence cycle of behavior into a level of conscious incompetence for a short season. Few embrace this with open arms as it is normal for human beings to get comfortable doing something in the way they first learned. Resistance to change emerges until someone is convinced of the benefits, sense and support for the change. Those who have a tendency in life to be motivated away from pain more than towards pleasure need to be nurtured carefully through change and may take longer than those who are the reverse of this personality style. The change process is not easy and complex as it touches every area and personality of the organization. The change agent assists the organization to minimize the negative consequences and maximize the possible benefits while responding to a perceived performance gap.

One of the strategies used in organizations was developed by Psychologist Kurt Lewin. He divided the change process into three main phases, unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. The thinking behind this process was the appreciation of the pre and post change situations that many agents miss while implementing change. Learning the process of change preparation is highlighted in the unfreezing process. The analogy itself allows for people and systems to loosed, soften and moldable. The reminder of this phase can help keep leaders and change agents alert before change in a transformational way occurs. The changing speaks for itself and the refreezing is the process of institutionalizing new methodology and patterns that are more effective in the current environment. This makes sense but may not be the best solution. It presupposes that institutionalizing or freezing is necessary. If one were to take the analogy further into Cryonics, the outcome would be life and mobility instead of suspended animation. This may be the flexibility necessary for the every changing environment today.

Other strategies of organizational change include force-coercion, rational persuasion, and shared power. Different situations call for different style and strategies. If the organization needs to act in an immediate crisis force-coercion may be necessary as rational persuasion and shared-power techniques are much slower and time consuming. Before implementing a particular strategy it is important for the leader or agent to be clear about the predicted outcomes of a particular strategy. Force-coercion will typically deliver temporary compliance whereas rational persuasion and shared-power, if implemented effectively in the right setting can deliver long-term internalization. Force-coercion is the use of legitimacy, rewards and punishments and the primary means of change. This is a much more command based approach from a positional stance. Most situations and people resist and resent this strategy as it leaves them out of the process and are merely directed to do something different. The rational persuasion strategy assumes that people will be motivated to change mainly by self-interest. This approach uses special knowledge and strong rational arguments to motivate people. This intellectual approach was favored in the modern era but as business and people shift towards a postmodern society it is less desirable as it elevates the intellect above experience, intuition and other senses.

The shared-power strategy or normative-reeducative approach, gains the support for change through the participation and empowerment of the people in the process. Change agents utilizing this strategy take the time to actively listen to the people and work at a deeper behavioral level to gain the buy in and direction from the wider team. This process acknowledges changes necessary at the attitude, values, beliefs and identity levels of the people and the impact on relationships during structural reengineering.

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