DIT 8214 Week 5 Discussion: Change Management Resistance

Student Name

Capella University

DIT-8214

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Submission Date 

The introduction of organizational change initiatives may face opposition that can have a significant impact on the implementation success. Resistance is especially a dynamic dimension that must be taken into account during change management (Sverdlik and Oreg, 2022). The resistance to change scale was created by Oreg (2003), who discovered that the scale measures the personality characteristic of the individual, since some people are more or less resistant to change in any given situation. The dispositional inclination has four reliable factors, and they are routine seeking, emotional response to change imposed, cognitive rigidity, and short-term orientation.

Indicatively, there are employees of the healthcare organizations who will never agree to implement new electronic health records or amended procedures whenever they realize that the changes would bring a positive impact to the affected patients. Oreg (2003) determined that individuals who had a high resistance to change had minimal chances of voluntary changes being implemented and had a slow adoption pace of new products, which depicts the embodiment of dispositional resistance in various contexts.

The distinction between the task-oriented and socio-political conflict is significant to implement the change successfully. The theory of the IT Conflict-Resistance that Meissonier and Houze (2010) designed demonstrated that socio-political oriented conflicts may be disguised as task-based conflicts that manifest themselves in relation to IT implementation. This action research in Netia Corporation demonstrated that the people in the computer department had initially technical concerns about the design of the ERP system, and subsequent research revealed that the employees had fears over the loss of autonomy and power redistribution. Val and Fuentes (2003) in their study found that sources of resistance depend on the degree of the change, such that in strategic change, greater resistance is created as an essential opposition as compared to evolutionary change.

The responses of the management to the resistance are very significant in the implementation outcomes. Rivard and Lapointe (2012) identified four possible implementers’ responses to research on user resistance: inaction, acknowledgment, rectification, and dissuasion, which have a different impact on the resistance behaviors. The 89-case survey of the case indicated that the response by the implementers directly affected the antecedents of resistance. Meissonier and Houze (2010) showed that the conventional wisdom is not actually true because avoidance management styles may positively result in the teams being self-solving on conflict and expressing tacit reasons of resistance.

Workaround behaviors are the other dimension that should be taken into account. Ferneley and Sobreperez (2006) distinguished the workaround activity as a phenomenon of its own, whereby users can be opposed, conforming, or generate workarounds in the presence of information systems. Whenever formal systems become cumbersome, employees in organizations tend to develop informal ways of doing things. The workarounds can be an adaptive response to an indication of problems that exist within the system or a signal of disobeying the organizational goals.

Finally, the implementation time course of resistance across the implementation stages will have to be mentioned. As Meissonier and Houze (2010) noted, the conflicts had evolved into aggressiveness and assumed a constructive role with the realignment of the project scope aimed at considering the issues underlying the situation. Recognizing resistance early, rather than suppressing it, allows project leaders to address root causes before they escalate. It demonstrates that an adaptive approach reveals the patterns of resistance as dynamic, responding to the changes in the management interventions and changes (Kilbourne et al., 2023). Those companies that practice thorough pre-implementation consultation of the stakeholders are better at the implementations and the total adoption rates in the long term, since the resistance is seen as diagnostic data rather than a barrier to working through it.