What is resistance? Resistance is a force that slows or stops movement. It is a natural and expected part of change. Any system, whether the human body or a financial services organization, resists any change that it believes to be harmful. If the worker has ever tried to lose weight, the worker will immediately recognize this dilemma.

As the worker try to lose a few pounds, employee’s metabolism slows to keep the worker from starving. Your body doesn't know that the worker is acting on a New Year's resolution -- it's simply trying to slow the worker down so that the worker can conserve energy.As a company begins reengineering, middle managers may resist because the company feel it will harm the employees. The company believes that the company might lose their authority or even their jobs. Their set point is the status quo, even though the company might actually see the need for change.

This is not altogether different from standing on a scale and resolving to lose those few pounds. You begin to realize that the mind and the body can work at cross purposes. “Change” is the popular word these days especially in public and private organizations.It may be described as radical change, or frame-breaking change, incremental change or frame-bending change. To achieve change in public and private organizations, leaders adopt different strategies.

These may be forced-coercion, rational persuasion or shared power strategies. A force-coercion strategy uses legitimacy, rewards, and/or punishments as primary inducements to change. Whereas, in rational persuasion strategy; the leader attempts to bring about change with special knowledge, empirical support, or rational arguments.In shared power strategy for change accommodation, the leader actively and sincerely involves other people who will be affected by a change in planning and making key decisions in respect to it. It is sometimes also called normative-re-educative strategy.

Any change must bring a different corporate culture and therefore different expectations from the employees in terms of their behavior and working attitudes. It encompasses all factors of corporate culture. A corporate culture may be defined as "the underlying assumptions, beliefs, values, attitudes, and expectations shared by the members of a public and private organization.When we talk about change management, it might simply mean willingness to sack people. Others might use it as a euphemism for a particularly aggressive or even bullying style of management. Caught amidst these changes are organizations and workers undergoing radical transformations in their cultures and work processes.

Unless these changes are managed well, liberalization and privatization cause severe human suffering, lead to economic failure, or in its worst case, push a country to turn its back on globalization (Machovec, 1995; Vickers, 1995; Fischer, 1999; Summers, 2000; Stiglitz, 2000).The word ‘change management’ may also be used in a context where what the management really meant was 'an ability to get things done'. This change is not brought by force as Gregory & Ricky (1989) states, “leadership does not involve force or coercion”. Current research of the subject Forms of Change in Business public and private organizations In business, change takes either of the two basic forms. It may happen when a public and private organization consciously decides to remake itself.

This could be part of a merger, de-merger or management buyout. It could be when a company changes focus. This kind of change follows a formal process.It starts with a master plan with inputs from the leader every now and then and the alterations would be made in a systematic fashion. Resistance to change usually accompanies changes. This is primarily because people prefer to maintain status quo and believe that any change is bad change.

Any reconfiguration will lie mainly within the bounds of the public and private organization and can be controlled by that public and private organization. The challenge of a leader here is like looking at a map and telling where does the public and private organization stand now and, what is the best route to get to the targets.When things get out of hands then it is the leader, who always goes back to the map and triangulates a new course to the targets or goals. The other type of change happens when public and private organizations are driven to reconfigure because of external pressures. These can be as simple as a new piece of legislation or government regulation.

An example may be the case when a public or private organization needs to amend its ways according to the new rules and regulations by the government. Government led change may not be negotiable and often comes with plenty of warning.There are many other external forces driving change that are less predictable. For example: radical technological advancements, competitor action, economic upset, accidents, social unrest, natural disasters and so on. Workplace trends/Practices Early attitude theorists (Katz, 1960; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960) argued that attitudes are structured along three dimensions that roughly correspond with the three definitions that have dominated research on resistance to change.

Critics usually label these three dimensions of attitudes the cognitive, emotional, and intentional.This conception is known as the tripartite view of attitudes (Ajzen, 1984). Moving beyond the wall History teaches the company that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Resistance kills change. Every day people resist new ideas -- a corporate reorganization dies of inertia ..

. developers and environmental groups polarize over a piece of land.. , a middle manager is stunned to see a pet project falter when peers refuse to implement it. Even at home, arguments break out every time a parent tries to make a teenager study harder.New ideas often fail, not on their relative merits, but on how well we are able to handle resistance.

Since change -- reengineering, quality improvement, reorganizations, mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, expansion, new product lines, and new procedures -- is intensifying throughout the financial services industry every day, that rate of failure will continue to grow. Organizations will pay for these failed dreams in dollars and lost opportunities. According to research by McKinsey and Company, only 23 percent of corporate mergers recover costs.Half of the mergers "went straight downhill," Anne B.

Fisher writes in Fortune. "Any manager is doomed if there is no real effort beforehand to see whether the two cultures have anything in common. Yet top management too often regards cultural chemistry as a pesky detail that can safely be left to the folks in companies' human resources departments. " The cost of failed change is high for organizations; the cost is equally dear for people. The first casualty is trust; people start to blame one another.

Too many botched plans and people become afraid to try again. Even so-called "successful" efforts often leave a bitter taste in the mouths of those who were forced to change. The toll on the individuals can be enormous. In some organizations the pace of change is so frantic and people feel so out of control that the workplace looks like a cast party for Night of the Living Dead; zombies are created. Resistance in these cases comes not so much from the particular change, but from the sheer immensity of what is asked of others.Managing change means managing resistance as well.

We must be able to anticipate resistance and learn to use its force to build support for change. But far too often we seem surprised when resistance appears, and we are not at all sure how to deal with it. We may view resistance as a massive wall that must be destroyed so that we can get on with the company’s work. We forget that there are people behind the wall, and when we try to destroy it, they fight back.

Often the company’s efforts succeed only in making the wall even stronger.In this view, the cognitive dimension of an attitude refers to an individual's beliefs about the attitude object. In their review of the literature on the tripartite view, Eagly and Chaiken define this dimension as follows: "beliefs express positive or negative evaluation of greater or lesser extremity, and occasionally are exactly neutral in their evaluative content" (1998: 271). The emotional dimension of an attitude refers to an individual's feelings in response to the attitude object.Eagly and Chaiken define this dimension as the "feelings, moods, emotions, and sympathetic nervous-system activity that people have experienced in relation to an attitude object and subsequently associate with it" (1998: 272).

Pros and Cons Change is not always a bad thing. Critics believe resistance to change is a very healthy sign and it should be encouraged in order to allow latitude to employees to start thinking out of the box. Change is unsettling. It disrupts the company’s world. Some fear the company will lose status, control, even their jobs.The larger the change, the stronger the resistance.

Successful change requires vision, persistence, courage, an ability to thrive on ambiguity, and a willingness to engage those who have a stake in the outcome. Courageous leaders face resistance and explore it. The company is curious and wonders why the company is so excited, while others tremble at the mere thought of change. These leaders know that inside the resistance lies hope, and that if the company can unleash its energy, the company will have the opportunity to build excitement for their ideas.There are many potential benefits of learning to work with resistance rather than against it: • Using the force of resistance can increase the company’s success rate and speed the time it takes to implement a new idea.

• Showing respect toward those who resist builds stronger relationships, not only improving the change at hand but providing a solid base for future changes. • Working with resistance increases the likelihood that all parties can meet at least some of their goals. • The voice of resistance can keep the company from taking untimely or foolish actions. But before the worker can work with resistance, the worker must define it.With a better understanding of the nature of resistance, the worker will become more adept at recognizing it and learn how to anticipate it.

As much as the worker wish for it, progress without resistance is impossible. People will always have doubts and questions. Even when the worker is the champion of change, the worker will still have doubts. Will this really work? Have I given the idea sufficient thought? Resistance is a natural part of change. It is also protection, energy, and paradox.

Protection, because it shields the company from harm. It keeps the company safe. By resisting, we may save ourselves a lot of unnecessary work, pain, and aggravation. Energy, because resistance is a powerful and frightening force. If the worker has ever faced a room full of people angry at some action the worker took, the worker will have no trouble recognizing its unique brand of energy. And a paradox, because change moves into resistance, resistance into change.

Pythagoras said that the world is set up in opposites -- day and night, up and down, black and white.The transformation from resistance to support can occur if we are willing to be part of the process. The Chinese symbolize this with a circle divided into two parts: yin and yang. Imagine the yin representing resistance and the yang representing change. As we move within the circle, we move closer to the opposite side. Maladaptive or undesirable behavior often persists in the face of attempts to eliminate it (e.

g. , human substance abuse, depredation by wild animals).Given that a wide range of behavior is maintained by its consequences (i. e. operant or instrumental behavior), one must understand how such consequences modulate the persistence of behavior in order to decrease undesirable behavior. One way to study how consequences affect the persistence of operant behavior has been to impose disrupters (e.

g. , extinction, satiation, distraction) on behavior maintained under differential reinforcement conditions (Nevin, 1974). A response that decreases less during disruption relative to pre-disruption response rates is considered more resistant to change than a response that decreases relatively more.Many studies have found that responding is more resistant to change in stimulus contexts associated with higher rates or larger magnitudes of reinforcement (Nevin, 1992). Behavioral momentum theory suggests that behavior is influenced both by operant and Pavlovian processes.

According to behavioral momentum theory, response rates and resistance to change are separable aspects of the three-term contingency, or discriminated operant, which is composed of a discriminative stimulus (SD) context, a response, and a consequence (Nevin and Grace, 2000, for a review).Response rates are governed by the operant relation between responding and reinforcement (i. e. , response–reinforcer relation; Herrnstein, 1970), whereas resistance to change is governed by the Pavlovian relation between a SD context and all reinforcement obtained in the presence of that context (i.

e. , stimulus–reinforcer relation; Nevin, 1992). Nevin et al. (1990) showed experimentally that baseline response rates are determined by response–reinforcer relations while resistance to change is governed by stimulus–reinforcer relations.

Pigeons responded in a two-component multiple schedules with equal variable-interval (VI) 60-s schedules in each component and response-independent variable-time (VT) food added to one component. The added response-independent food enhanced the stimulus–reinforcer relation by increasing the number of food presentations in the presence of that stimulus, but degraded the response–reinforcer relation by weakening the contingency between responding and reinforcement.Although baseline response rates were lower in the component with added food, resistance to satiation and extinction relative to baseline response rates was greater in that component. These findings suggest that the relative rate of reinforcement in the presence of a stimulus context determines resistance to change and that degrading the response–reinforcer relation may not influence resistance to change (Cohen, 1996, Grimes and Shull, 2001, Harper, 1999, Mace et al. , 1990, Shahan and Burke, 2004 and Shull et al. 2002).

The finding that adding response-independent reinforces decrease response rates but increase resistance to change also has been shown in applied contexts. For instance, Ahearn et al. (2003) found that rates of stereotypic behavior in children diagnosed with autism decreased when given access to a preferred item, but resistance to disruption tended to be greater.Given that providing alternative sources of reinforcement frequently are used to decrease problematic behavior (e.

g. noncontingent reinforcement (NCR); Thompson and Iwata, 2005, for a review), understanding the role of stimulus–reinforcer and response–reinforcer relations in resistance to change is important for understanding the utility of widely used behavioral treatments (Nevin, 1996). Although there is much evidence in support of the role of the stimulus–reinforcer relation in governing resistance to change, a number of studies have shown that the response–reinforcer relation also may affect resistance to change.For instance, studies examining contingencies that produce different response rates have shown that low-rate responding typically is more resistant to change than high-rate responding when reinforcement rates are equal (e. g.

, (Lattal, 1989) and (Nevin et al. , 2001); but Fath et al. , 1983). In addition, degrading the response–reinforcer relation by decreasing response–reinforcer contiguity with unsignaled nonresetting delays to reinforcement decreases both response rates and resistance to change relative to responding maintained by immediate reinforcement ((Bell, 1999) and (Grace et al. 1998); cf.

Podlesnik et al. , 2006).With an unsignaled nonresetting delay to reinforcement, the response that meets a schedule requirement starts a delay that is timed independently of further responding during the delay and with no change in stimulus conditions (e. g. , (Sizemore and Lattal, 1977), (Sizemore and Lattal, 1978) and (Williams, 1976)). Thus, unsignaled delays to reinforcement degrade the response–reinforcer relation by inserting a delay between the response that fulfills the reinforcement-schedule requirement and the delivery of the reinforcer.

Further, Podlesnik et al. showed that the duration of the scheduled delay was negatively related to resistance to change, suggesting that decreases in response–reinforcer contiguity can decrease resistance to change. Thus, counter to behavioral momentum theory, degrading response–reinforcer relations appear to affect resistance to change when reinforcement rates are similar. The main drawback of resistance to change is that it hampers innovation and rarely helps in challenging status-quo.

Key Learning There is power in metaphor, but the physical metaphor of "resistance to change" may have taken us as far as we can go. This research paper has illustrated that resistance to change is surely planning for failure, and to take the good intentions of resistors seriously and for the varying emphases in conceptualizations of resistance, organizations must develop an open communication environment in the organization.Organizations face resistance from employees on a daily basis, and this resistance expression might vary from person to person. However, the trends of resistance to change identified above indicate that resistance is not all that bad, in fact if used sagaciously, it can be an asset for progressive organizations who foster individuals to think out of the box and work for the achievement of the company’s vision/mission.