PPT
WEEK 4.Resistance
Cognitive, Affective and Behavioural Responses to Change
From Smollan (2006)
&
Akella, D., & Khoury, G. (2019). Resistance to Organizational Change in Academia
Review
Wk 1
How sound are the underlying theories, methods and ideas on change, that managers and consultants adhere to?
Wk2
Why is it necessary to consider complex contexts and cross-cultural dimensions in organisations during change?
Wk 3
Why and how do employees’ experiences of participation influence their perceptions and response to change, the effectiveness of organisational change and the success of the change?
Stages of change and employee participation
Problem identification
Creating solution
Implementation
- Payments company not clear stages but individuals had identified change they wanted and participation was unstructured
- Housing development company project team led consultation process therefore changes originated from staff with staff working on problems suggesting processes and actions for implementing change
- Policing Trust in knowledge of external consultants was questioned employee participation focussed on implementation –consulting on job design etc. Perceptions of a lack of equity or fairness silo views worked against the change
Breadth
- Project management police –restricted range of activities, top down management breadth of participation judged low, sporadic general unclear communication about need for change and actions required, employees did not respond to managers open door policies
- Lean systems housing- breadth high, broad range of participation , staff involved in problem identification, staff volunteers participated in project team, experimentation in detail staff involved in decision accelerator formal consultation on job description change and clear line manager communication during
- Dialogic sensemaking payments company - moderate breadth perceived not structured nor perceived as clear by employees. Some participants unclear about the business benefits however high improvement in business performance and individual stories about business improvement led to higher employee engagement
Depth of participation involvement
- Depth is quality, Involvement is employee power over decision making (Clarke & Higgs , 2019)
- Employee participation at the dialogic discourse at payments company was judged to offer the greatest degree of involvement and therefore greatest depth., individual change in work through participation in small groups the organisation followed by resourcing the change. Individuals experienced high levels of involvement using dialogic discourse
- Employee participation in Lean intervention housing said to be high for some low for others ], long serving staff had experienced frustration by a lack of control but the project teams enabled them to be involved unlike previous experiences. They were able to experiment with changes. However volunteers from front line services were viewed as separate and different, middle managers were excluded from frontline group- low participation by some- external consultants questioned and restructuring decision making unclear
- Employee participation at policing project management – weakest degree of involvement and lack of power , external consultants advised on the problem identification and solutions stages derives the recommendations …the degree of participation was consultation confined to implementation exclusion of employees early led to confusion about when staff should be informed resulted in mis- communication
Week 4
Resistance and sensemaking
Cognitive, affective and behavioural responses
Emotions and change
Rollercoaster effect
Model of change and research study (Smollan, 2006)
Week 4 Focus Question
How, do we make sense of change and how do we respond to organisational change across the dimensions of cognition, affect and behaviour?
Resistance is relational
- resistance to organizational change involves both change agents and change recipients taking responsibility for the change.
- Employees’ resistance to change is observed made sense of and given appropriate meanings by the change agents (Ford et al., 2008).
- Employees’ actions, conversations and reactions are behavioral triggers which change agents make sense of and label as resistance.
Dynamic nature of relationships during change
“engage all forces of change, all contributions to change i.e., recipient action, agent sensemaking and organizational background and the dynamics of relationship” (Ford et al., 2008, p. 362),
Studies should go beyond the “one-sided change agent centric view” (Ford et al., 2008, p.362; Kulkarni, 2016) by critically reflecting on the contributory role of the change agents and the agent-recipient relationships (Dent & Goldberg, 1999, Ford et al., 2008)
Reflective learning is an important tool for change agents
“Reflexivity has been identified as a useful method to support change agents” and assist them in understanding their role in the entire change process” (Ostentoski, 2015, p.41).
But HOW?
Action reflection new action (Schon, 1987)
Reflection allows for questioning & learning
Sensemaking
“change agents and the change recipients together make sense of the events, conversations and decisions which surround the change process with change agents trying to sensemake- how will this get accomplished? “(p363)
Sensemaking involves seeking information, ascribing meanings, understanding behaviors and conversations and acting on these interpretations (Balogun & Johnson, 2004; Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010; Mills, Thurlow & Mills, 2010; Tucker et al., 2015; Weick, 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005).
Change agents mobilise support through relational sensemaking
- Change is dependent on mobilizing employee support through talk and conversations with the employees (Ford et al., 2008).
- When change agents ignore this aspect it invariably leads to resistance (Ashkenas & Jick, 1992)
- Sense making is a process “grounded in identity construction, retrospection…ongoing…focused on and by extracted cues and driven by plausibility rather than accuracy” (Weick, 1995, p.17)
- SIR COPE (Weick ,1995)
- E SIRI COPE (Greenwood, 2016)
SENSEMAKING IS
- the discursive process of constructing and interpreting the social world” (Gephart, 1993, p. 1485).
- process of studying and interpreting how the actions of the actors influence and give meaning to the reality or external sequence of events. Sense- making is primarily a process “grounded in identity construction, retrospection…ongoing…focused on and by extracted cues and driven by plausibility rather than accuracy” (Weick, 1995, p.17).
- Rouleau (2005, p. 1415) clarifies sensemaking how managers “understand, interpret and create sense for themselves based on the information surrounding strategic change”
- highly retrospective and prospective thinking process involved in constructing reality where the emphasis is laid on making sense of past events to influence the sequence of future events. In other words, sensemaking “is a process” (Balogun & Johnson, 2004; Cornelissen, 2012; Gephart, Topal & Zhang, 2010; Weick, 1995 as cited in Maitlis & Christianson, 2014, p. 66)
Sensemaking
- “is a recurring cycle” (Louis, 1980 as cited in Maitlis & Christianson, 2014, p. 66) and “unfolds as a sequence” (Weick et al., 2005 as cited in Maitlis & Christianson, 2014, p. 66).
- Members confront events, issues and actions which they interpret and explain in the context of their environments using their past experiences and knowledge (Weick, 1995). The crux of sensemaking is on its emphasis on “retrospective interpretation of the actual event” (Giogia et al., 1994, p. 623) to create a future perfect situation.
Auto ethnography- Assessment 1
auto-ethnography can be effectively used to give voice to those events, situations and conversations which otherwise might have remained silent (Doloriet & Sambrook, 2012).
- “People seem to see past events as much more rationally ordered than current or future events, because retrospective sensemaking erases many of the casual sequences that complicate and obscure the present and future” (Starbuck & Miliken, 1988, p. 37).
- Sensemaking here would be concerned with picking out elements and incidents from the past and then reconnecting them to write a story “which makes present and future meaningful” (Degn, 2015, p. 1183).
Responses to change
| Positive | Negative | Neutral | Mixed | |
| Cognitive | The change is a good idea | The change is a bad idea | Change is neither good nor bad | Change has good and bad elements |
| Affective | Hope, excitement. happiness, pride | Anger, disgust anxiety, frustration | No emotions | Positive and negative |
| Behavioural | Support | Resist | Accept | Support Resist Accept |
*
Think feel act
- Management is mostly concerned with how people behave.
- They are less concerned with what employees think and
- Tend to view emotions as irrational and a distraction
*
organisational efficiency is heightened
“the more it is ‘dehumanised’, the more it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation.”
Weber, 1946
Traditional Views
EMOTION REASON
- Illogical
- Irrational
- Subjective
- Disruptive
- Hot-headed
- Inefficient
- Dysfunctional
- Chaotic
- Female
- Logical
- Rational
- Objective
- Constructive
- Cool-headed
- Efficient
- Functional
- Orderly
- Male
*
Consider a change you were involved in- perhaps the one you will write about for your assessment
How did you (and others) react:
- Cognitively
- Affectively
- Behaviourally
*
Rollercoaster of change
Schneider & Goldwasser, 1998
The grief cycle of personal change
- Denial – isolation
- Anger – and “range, envy, resentment”
- Bargaining – guilt
- Depression – hopelessness and bitterness
- Acceptance – hope, but mostly “void of feelings”
Kubler-Ross (1969).
On Death and Dying
*
Adams et al., in Elrod & Tippett, 2002
(various types of life changes)
*
Imara, in Elrod & Tippett, 2002
(illness/death)
Menninger, in Elrod & Tippett, 2002
(Peace Corp volunteers = personal change)
Katzenbach and Smith, in Elrod & Tippett, 2002
(changing to teamwork)
Model of individual responses to change and PhD research:
Smollan, R. K. (2006)
Minds, hearts and deeds: cognitive, affective and
behavioural responses to change
Journal of Change Management 6(2), 143-158
&
PhD thesis (2009)
Model of cognitive, affective and behavioural responses to change
Change event
Thinking/perception
Positive
Negative
Neutral
Mixed
Emotion
Positive
Negative
Neutral
Mixed
Behaviour
Positive
Negative
Neutral
Mixed
Think again!
*
Cognitive responses
1. Perceived favourability of outcomes of
change
2. Perceived scale of change
3. Perceived frequency, timing and speed of
change
4. Perceived justice of change
1. Favourability of outcomes
- Made redundant -‘I wanted to howl my eyes out’ (D)
- Merger/restructuring
‘horrible feeling of lack of control’;
‘we felt quite useless’ (P)
2. Scale/size
- Restructure/outsourcing
‘It was extra huge’ ‘It pushed me to the point where I broke and it changed my life.’ (B)
- Merger – job did not change, little anxiety (X)
Big for whom?
3. Time - speed
- Too quick – ‘freefall’ (O)
- Too slow – ‘marathon effect’ (W) (Bridges, 2003)
- ‘Delay causes pain’
(E)
Suspended-fired-won case
‘I just really wanted it to be over and after a two-year period there’s only so much emotional hurt that you can go through and uncertainty and it was almost like closure, just knowing that it was over and that I could move on. It was really, really difficult during that period of time’ (V).
Time - frequency
- Too much = burnout
‘I’ve seen a couple of people in the last few months elect to leave the business because of the degree of change and they’ve said that the reason why they’ve left is that there’s been too much change in this organisation over a period of time and some of these people…have been in roles for 10 or 15 years [and are]…brow beaten.
Change is cool, we all accept that but it’s the frequency and the degree of it, and that degree of uncertainty…[that have] a significant emotional impact on people.’
- Distributive – not all people who were made redundant thought it was unfair
- Procedural – no consultation = not fair
- Interpersonal – ‘He wouldn’t look me in the eye’ (D)
- Informational – ‘What pissed me off was just the lies’ ‘They cloaked it as a re-organization (B)
Factors in the individual
Emotional intelligence
Disposition (personality)
Previous experience of change
Change and stress outside the workplace
Emotional intelligence
- The ability to understand and manage own emotions.
- The ability to understand and respond to the emotions of others.
Participants were aware of their emotional reactions and those of others.
Some claimed to have EI and that this helped them and others.
Personality
- Openness to experience (willingness to do new things)
- Cynicism
- Resilience (not giving up)
- Locus of control (being able to control life)
- Change self-efficacy (confidence to be able to manage change)
BUT – H said she was open to change & resilient but the obstacles were too great
Factors in the leader(s)
Leadership ability
Emotional intelligence
Trustworthiness
Perceived factors in the leader(s)
Leadership ability –
Ability to lead/manage
Ability to lead/manage change
Boss & more senior managers
“I spoke my mind but it often fell on deaf ears.” (T)
Some spoke of participation and consultation, some of good interpersonal skills, some of support.
Leader EI
“He is the loveliest man…and very supportive…but he just doesn’t care when people are drowning… he’s got the lowest EQ of anybody I’ve ever met…he’s oblivious to how people are feeling.
I remember one day going into his office and bursting into tears and he just couldn’t work out what was going on...he didn’t really know what to do. He kind of patted me on the back.”
Leader Trustworthiness
“There’s certainly been a strong loss of trust … and I had a very, very high level of trust and now I don’t have such a high level of trust. ..I had an unrealistic high level of trust before.” (A)
“You had a view that while we debated openly there was stuff going on behind closed doors so there was a trust issue there.” (M)
Trust in whom –
immediate manager/those higher up?
Factors in the organisation
1 Culture
2 Context
Factors in the organisation
Culture
“youthful, casual and fun”
“anything-goes spirit” and “off the wall culture”
“warring fiefdoms and a passive-defensive culture that was hostile to outsiders”
Organisational culture
“It was always Ministry are taking over. We certainly felt under-valued and demoralised. There was a real culture of stamping on any of the sort of features of [our] culture in the past. It was big brother stomping on little brother.” (P)
Culture
“A very strong professional managerial culture…
“People in this profession are notorious for not getting in touch with their emotions.” (A)
Other participants (managers) believed it was OK to discuss emotions with other managers but not with staff – it was not ‘professional .
“Ours was an organisation where a lot of the culture was fostered and supported by a very devolved management style.
They took that away and so that has a huge affect on people’s ability to be quite passionate about their jobs.” (P)
Context
- Growth v decline
- Positive changes v negative change
- Social, technological, economic, political
- Govt org. v profit making (e.g. TVNZ - TV3)
Takeover of govt. agencies (P)
Takeover of private co. (H)
*
Applying Force Field analysis as a theoretical framework
Barriers – write 2-3 Barriers to a change you have all experienced (one per post it)
‘Post its’ collected and put on the white board or paper –diagram
Organise post - its into categories
Allocate 3 votes each to the most important BARRIERS
Applying Force Field analysis as a theoretical framework
Drivers – write 2-3 drivers to a change you have all experienced (one per post it)
‘Post its’ collected and put on the white
board or paper –diagram
Organise ‘post – its’ into categories
Allocate 3 votes each to the most important BARRIERS