ILPC 2027

The efficient management of organizational change is one of the most prevailing topics in firms and public organizations. Recent large surveys on German firms found, that nearly 90% of them evaluate change management as “important” or “most important” management task (Claßen 2010). Accordingly, there are numerous publications on the theme reaching from mainly application-oriented contributions to those explicitly addressing theoretical questions about organizational change. 

“Resistance to change” like “counter argumentation”, “ritualism”, “passivity”, “weariness” or “making jokes” has been always a dominating topic of change management (Ford/Ford/D´Amelio 2008; Prasad/Prasad 2000) and appears as a permanent problem to change managers. Thus, in German empirical surveys and conceptual publications on the theme, “resistance” is one of the most mentioned explanations for the failure of organizational change processes (Claßen 2010: 47; Lauer 2010: 41). This way, “resistance to change” constantly reveals the necessity to understand organizational change itself as independent problem which needs independent (change) management.

The paper takes this situation as initial point to investigate the conceptual foundations of change management-approaches. In particular, it explores the conceptualization of „resistance“ and the discursive construction of the „resistant “change recipient” in established German change management-approaches. This way, the paper presents a secondary analysis of 31 of the German best-selling monographs on change management published over the last 10 years. The body of analysis contains well established text books widely used at universities as well as consultant-oriented publications, and thus presents literature which is explicitly pedagogical and practical guiding in character.

The semantic analysis of these publications reveals three main “messages” referring the characteristics of resistance. These messages are 1) that resistance is a „natural“, nearly inevitable phenomenon in organizational change processes, 2) that every behavior of employees in change processes is potentially resistant and thus often „false faced“ in character, and 3) that resistance is often „irrational“ and “emotional”.

These results point to some general and partly hidden characteristics of the conceptual foundations of the analysed management-approaches presented in the literature. These are for instance the general tendency to objectify the motives and behavior of employees, to personalize resistance and to provide it with a pathological connotation. In general, the results confirm the critical diagnosis about change management being “change-agent-centric” and “one-sided” (Ford/Ford/D´Amelio 2008) and describing change and resistance as “objective” reality (Tsoukas/Chia 2002).  From a critical standpoint, this appears as rather problematic understanding of (employee) agency and resistance.

Deriving from this, the paper further concentrates on the concealed modes of the discursive de-legitimisation and disempowerment of “resistance to change” in the analyzed approaches. Hence, the implicit degradation of resistance by framing it as “emotional” and therefore “irrational” barrier to change located in the single individual is an example of such a discursive degradation. A rather contrary example is the admonition of the potentially “false-faced” character of resistance. Thus, “rational arguments” brought into discussion by employees, get de-legitimated as “pretended” arguments hiding the “real motives” for resistance.

Finally, the results once more point to a necessary and overdue reconceptualization of “resistance to change” in the literature on change management. Moreover, the results motivate questions on the high popularity of these monographs as well as on the general philosophies of management education referring to “resistance” in organizations.

References

Claßen, M. (2010): Wenn Mitarbeiter nicht so wollen wie sie sollen. In: Rank, S. / Scheinpflug, R. (eds.): Change Management in der Praxis. 2th edition, Berlin.

Ford, J.D. / Ford, L.W. /D´Amelio, A. (2008): Resistance to Change. The Rest of the Story. In: Academy of Management Review, 33(2): 362-377.

Prasad, P. / Prasad, A. (2000): Stretching the Iron Cage: The Constitution and Implications of Routine Workplace Resistance. In: Organization Science, 11(4): 387-403.

Tsoukas, H. / Chia, R. (2002): On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change. In: Organization Science, 13(5): 761-778.