Resistance to Change

What resistance to change is

Resistance to change (مقاومة التغيير) is the response of employees to a change their establishment introduces, in a way that delays its adoption, distorts it or stalls it, whether that response is voiced as an objection or shows up as delay or silence. The term describes what shows at work in the face of a change. It is not a verdict that anyone is stubborn: there can be sound reasons behind it, and it can expose a flaw in the change itself.

Resistance to change is a management concept about carrying out change inside an establishment. It contains no regulatory description of anyone’s rights or duties.

How the definition relates to change management

The glossary entry on Change Management defines the human side of a transformation. It includes a short passage stating that resistance is not necessarily stubbornness, and it names three conditions to which resistance can be a rational response: a personal cost that is clear set against a benefit that is vague, a change that comes with no stated reason, and a previous experience.

The definition of resistance to change starts where that passage stops. It does not explain the three conditions again. It takes up what the passage leaves aside: how resistance shows itself, the forms it takes, how one cause can be told from another in a specific situation, what information resistance can carry, and what a manager can do once the cause has been diagnosed.

What forms does resistance to change take?

The following classification is a practical one of our own, based on how the response shows itself, and we do not attribute it to any particular source:

• Open resistance. An objection raised in a meeting, put in writing or taken to a manager, or an explicit refusal to use the new tool. It is visible to the manager, because the person says what they think.
• Passive resistance. Agreement in words without action, delay in carrying out the change on grounds that seem acceptable on the surface, partial adoption that leaves parts of the old method in place, or a quiet return to the old method when nobody is watching.
• Silent resistance. Outward compliance combined with withdrawal from engagement: no questions, no comments, no suggestions. It can conceal a lack of conviction.

One person can move through more than one form during a single change. An employee who objects at first and sees no effect from the objection can stop objecting, and so move from open resistance to silent resistance. This is a possibility, not a rule.

How resistance to change shows in daily work

Passive and silent resistance do not announce themselves. They are inferred from behaviour that can be observed, and no single sign points to resistance on its own:

• A gap between the number of people trained on the new tool and the number actually using it.
• Part of the team still working on the old tool after the announced date for retiring it.
• Repeated questions about when the previous way of working will return.
• An absence of questions and comments in meetings that discuss the change.
• Passing anything to do with the new tool to a colleague or a manager without trying it first.

Each sign can have an innocent explanation, such as a crowded schedule or an employee being away. For that reason the signs are taken together and followed up with a question, not with an accusation.

Telling one cause of resistance from another

The same response can come from different causes, and no single remedy addresses all of them. The questions that follow are ones we suggest for reflection when diagnosing the cause. They are not a fixed procedure:

• Does the employee know what is being asked? If not, the cause can lie in how clear the message was rather than in the employee’s stance.
• Can the employee perform the new way of working? Avoiding the tool can be a way of avoiding mistakes in front of colleagues, not a rejection of the tool.
• Is the new way harder than the old one in the employee’s work? The complaint can be accurate, in which case it is information about how the change was designed.
• Does the employee trust that the change will last? Where earlier initiatives were announced and then dropped, waiting can be caution rather than refusal.
• What does the employee personally stand to lose or gain? This is the personal cost that the change management entry mentions.

These questions are hard to answer unless the employee feels that a frank answer is safe. Whether a frank answer feels safe connects with the condition known as Psychological Safety at work. Where that condition is present, an employee can say “I cannot” or “I see no benefit” without it counting against them. Where it is absent, the employee might choose silence, so the answer disappears and the resistance remains.

Tools that bring the cause to the surface

A manager can draw on tools that collect employees’ views without waiting for a problem to surface:

• Pulse surveys. A manager can run a Pulse Survey, a short questionnaire sent out at close intervals. Its fixed questions make it possible to follow the team’s stance on one specific change from round to round, on condition that the team is told what changed as a result of the previous round. Otherwise the team can learn that answering has no effect.
• Continuous feedback. Comments given close to the event and in both directions are what Continuous Feedback consists of. The manager hears from the team what is holding back adoption while the obstacle is still small, and tells the team what the manager notices about their use of the tool before it turns into a habit.

What can a manager do after the diagnosis?

The readings that follow are possibilities, not a rule. Each one pairs a cause with a response that may suit it:

• When the cause is an unclear message. A possible response is to explain why the change is happening and what was not working before, and to repeat that explanation through different channels.
• When the cause is a lack of ability. One response is training and practice on real tasks, together with a period in which a temporary drop in speed is accepted.
• When the cause is a flaw in the design. Another answer can be to amend the change itself, and in that case the objection is a contribution, not an obstacle.
• When the cause is lost confidence that the change will last. What can help is an announced date for the switch, a named person who follows it up, and keeping to what was announced.
• When the cause is a personal cost. One option is a frank conversation about how the change affects the employee’s role and prospects, together with involving the employee in designing what affects them, an approach whose degrees are set out under Participative Leadership.

Several causes can exist together in one employee or one team, so settling for a single remedy falls short.

What Kotter said about obstacles to change

John Kotter published an article in the March and April 1995 issue of Harvard Business Review titled “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail”. In it he set out what he had observed in more than 100 companies that had tried to remake themselves, and he listed eight errors that recur in these efforts. We read the version of the article published in the magazine, and two points in it bear on resistance to change:

• Under the fifth error, not removing obstacles to the new vision, he notes that the obstacle can lie in the organisational structure, such as narrowly defined jobs; in the pay or performance appraisal system, when it makes people choose between the new vision and their own interests; or in managers who refuse to change and make demands that run against the whole effort.
• Under the fourth error, undercommunicating the vision, he describes patterns of communication, among them one in which some highly visible senior executives keep behaving in ways that contradict the vision, so that doubt among employees rises and their belief in what they are told falls.

This supports the possibility that what gets called resistance is a response to a system that did not change, or to leadership behaviour that contradicts what was announced, without amounting to a general verdict on every change. We do not carry over a success or failure rate from the article, because it describes what its author observed and is not a measurement to generalise from. Kotter’s name is also attached to an eight step framework for leading a transformation, and its steps are set out in the entry Kotter Eight Step Change Model.

A worked example: why one remedy is not enough

Take a hypothetical establishment with 40 employees that introduced a new tool for recording orders. After four weeks, 14 employees were using it, which is 14 ÷ 40 = 35%. Those not using it number 40 minus 14, which equals 26 employees. Short interviews were then held with the 26, and their reasons were grouped as follows: 10 could not work the tool, 8 found the old method faster in their work, 5 did not trust the tool to last because earlier initiatives had been dropped, and 3 gave no specific reason. The total is 10 + 8 + 5 + 3 = 26.

As shares of the 26 who do not use it: 10 ÷ 26 = 38.5%, 8 ÷ 26 = 30.8%, 5 ÷ 26 = 19.2% and 3 ÷ 26 = 11.5%, which together make 100%. An extra training course, a remedy that might come to mind, addresses 10 of the 26, or 38.5%. The 8 who find the old method faster could be carrying information about the tool’s design that is worth examining, and the 5 who do not trust the tool to last could need something different, namely a public commitment.

The example is hypothetical, with figures set for illustration only. They have no basis in any establishment or study, and they do not imply that a distribution like this one occurs in any establishment.

Resistance to change, the psychological contract and team development

The unwritten expectations that an employee and the establishment hold of each other go by the name Psychological Contract. A change can touch those expectations. An employee who expected stability in a role and then sees the change reach that role can take the change as a breach of what they understood, and resistance then emerges. This is one interpretive possibility, not a verdict on any specific cause.

Resistance also differs from the conflict that the Tuckman Model anticipates in a newly formed team. That conflict concerns roles and methods inside the team, whereas resistance is a response to a change that comes from the establishment and lands on teams that already exist. The two can coincide when a team is reconstituted as part of a wider change.

How is resistance to change misunderstood?

• Treating it as a flaw in the employee. It can be a rational response, as the change management entry states, and it can be a source of information about a fault in the design.
• Counting every objection as resistance. An objection built on accurate information is feedback on the change, and classing it as an obstacle is a poor fit.
• Taking quiet for acceptance. The resistance can be silent, which is not the same as agreement.
• Assuming training is the remedy in every case. The worked example shows training addressing one cause among several.
• Leaving it to organization development alone. Raising an establishment’s general capacity to adapt is the ongoing effort of Organization Development, while resistance concerns a specific transformation with a beginning and an end.

What share of changes meet resistance?

In the sources we reviewed, we found no established figure for the share of organisational changes that meet resistance, and no established success or failure rate for change programmes that we could refer readers to. We do not propose a figure of our own. Resistance varies with the change, with the people it affects and with the establishment’s record on earlier changes, and each case is examined by asking its team, not by reference to a general average.

Resistance to change remains a reading of what surfaces during a transformation, not a recipe to apply to people. It points a manager to a place that needs a question, and whatever is decided after that rests on what the employees themselves say and on the nature of the change that touches their work.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.