Think about how many changes you have had to deal with over the years—moving house, moving school, changing teachers, getting a job, learning a new subject. Change is inevitable, and in the world of business it is increasingly important to not only to embrace change, but to initiate it. However, employee resistance to change is a hugely complex and challenging issue that faces the modern-day management of all companies. Given the need for product development, technological advancement and increased efficiency, resistance to change can ultimately kill a company if it is not dealt with immediately.
Many theorists have written about the ‘resistance to change’, including Coch and French (1948), Sander (1950) and Kotter and Schlesinger (1979). But what exactly does ‘resistance to change’ mean? In 1950, Sander described it as ‘behaviour which is intended to protect an individual from the effects of real or imagined change’. According to de Jeger (2001), ‘resistance is simply a very effective, very powerful and very useful survival mechanism’.
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