Employee’s Resistance and Organizational Change Factors

Abstract

Organizations need to change due to challenges they are facing caused by the dynamic environment where they operate. Also, organizations undertake changes because they have new ideas to improve their performance. So, organizational changes are imposed by factors of external or internal environment. The aim of every change is to improve organizational performance by increasing its effectiveness. Sometimes, changes are proposed during crises time. In crisis’s situation, organizations need to cut their costs, and the most common change is reducing staff. In every situation, change is something new for employees. Change affect employees because they are going to implement it. They can show positive attitude/behavior (readiness to change) or negative attitude/behavior (resistance to change) to proposed change. When employees show positive attitude, they agree on change and they are motivated to implement it. On the other hand, negative attitudes reflect that employees do not agree to organizational change. They are not motivated to involve in organizational change and sometimes they refuse it. Change managers are interested to have employees which are motivated and opened to change because this can lead to a successful change management process. On the other side, resistance to change can lead to the failure of change, because resistance may create costs and delays into change management process. This paper will explain which factors impose organizations to undertake changes time to time. Also, it will analyze how employees behave during organizational change. The aim of this paper is to explain why employees resist to organizational change and how can change managers reduce employees resistance.