Perspectives on the definition of resistance

When implementing change initiatives, leaders hope to foster commitment and compliance from employees. However, humans are creatures of habit who naturally resist change on multiple dimensions. Defining resistance to change is an important step to understanding and managing resistance. However, organizational change literature offers various definitions that mostly view resistance from a managerial perspective, which sees resistance as a negative hurdle that management must overcome to achieve organizational goals.

Individual

Woodman and Dewett (2004) offer a definition of resistance from the perspective of individual employees, saying that resistance is an individual’s negative emotional, cognitive, and intentional response to change. The authors offer changeability, depth, and time as dimensions of individual change that help managers to understand resistance. New employees are readily changeable, making socialization a unique opportunity to make deeper and more meaningful impressions in a short period. However, the more employees settle in their roles, the more they will resist change. Similarly, those who most resist change are likely to need the change (Marcus & Weber, 2001). Woodman and Dewett propose that understanding the organizational influences on individual change provides a richer understanding for dealing with resistance to facilitate systemic change.

Unwillingness

Klein (1969) saw resistance as an unwillingness to support a change. Pideret (2000) updated this by proposing that resistance is an attitude that can be negative emotional, cognitive, and intentional responses to change.

Fear

Explaining the source of resistance from an organizational psychology perspective, Jex (2002) proposes that humans find comfort in routine and will suffer anxiety when they sense a threat to the status quo. This fear generally comes from a belief that change will have an adverse impact or from fear of the unknown.

Overt and covert

Resistance can come from a spectrum of overt and covert forms. Judson (1991) outlines a continuum of change responses to different types of resistance. On an extreme end of the spectrum are active forms of resistance, which include sabotage, work stoppages, reducing productivity to minimal levels, and protests. Resistance can also take passive forms, like doing only what is required and refusing to learn. Change efforts can also face indifference, which includes apathy and passive resignation. Finally, on the other extreme end of the spectrum, employees can openly accept the change by cooperating under coercion or with enthusiasm.

Stability

The competing managerial and critical perspectives both assume that cultural stability is the root of resistance (Nord & Jermier, 1994). From the critical perspective of workers, solidarity can resist management oppressors. From the managerial perspective, cultural hangovers constrict day-to-day processes. Marin and Frost (1996 in Hatch, 2004) called this clash the “organizational culture war games” (191). The battle lines in this war emphasize consistency, harmony, and consensus; with the perspective that culture consists of subcultures with competing epistemological positions. Organizational literature traditionally attempts to resolve the conflict by asserting that fitting employees with organizational values can create cultural harmony. The war games metaphor draws attention to debates within culture but distracts from the cultural dynamics at work within a culture (Hatch, 2004).

Struggle for domination

Malinouski (1945, in Hatch, 2004) saw stability as a counterforce to change, noting that established cultural elements acted as stabilizing forces that limited the emergence of the new system. This limitation causes three possible products of contact between cultures: conflict, cooperation, or compromise. Cultural change through planned incursions becomes domination of one group by another. In this case, resistance emerges in the struggle for domination among the groups. This means that resistance is not in the culture, but that the domination in cross-cultural relationships is accountable for resistance.

Applied to organizational change, this cross-cultural perspective helps to differentiate followers and leaders as belonging to different cultures, explaining the powerful resistance that can occur when management implements change interventions. Understanding power relations suggests that a better approach to cultural change is to not only acknowledge but to also participate in the dynamic processes that already exist in the culture, thus fitting the intervention into the flow of change and stability inherent in the culture. This requires a simultaneous focus on what to preserve and what to change, innovating cultural change by introducing new meaning through dynamic interaction.

Culture

Organizational culture is increasingly gaining attention as a target of organizational change. Writers of organizational literature traditionally focused mostly on culture as a stable force that resists change, moving only through management intervention. In a review of organizational change literature, Hatch (2004) concluded that most of the organizational change literature emphasizes the benefits of changing organizational culture to enhance performance by pitting stability against managerial demands for adaptability. However, classic writings from sociology and anthropology offer a different perspective that organizational change practitioners are starting to notice. Rather than being just a force of resistance, sociologists and anthropologists have documented interacting forces of stability and change in culture, noting the evolution and dynamics of culture.

Competing forces

Early anthropologists of cultural dynamics understood the importance of considering change in relation to stability while noting that different cultures move at different rates. Hatch (2004) proposes that the sociological and anthropological perspectives suggest two important keys for unlocking organizational dynamics. First, just as change is a constant force in humanity, change is also constant in organizational cultures. Second, just as different parts of human culture change at different rates, parts of organizational culture change while other parts remain stable. Stability and change simultaneously exist in organizational culture.