Assignment about What is Institutional Affiliation?

Student Name
INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION(S)
MANAGING CHANGE 02

P a g e | 1
Introduction
Resistance to change can be defined as an inevitable response made towards any
major change taking place in an organization. The response can be attributed to the notion
that individuals will rush to defend their traditional status quo if they find that their status or
security is threatened (Sorre, 2016). Organizational change may develop scepticism among
employees which makes them resistant towards change, sometimes making the change
process impossible or complicated to integrate organizational improvement moves. In this
sense, it can be said that resistance to change tends to be viewed negatively and makes it
difficult for organizational managers to manage change. This essay will herewith compare
and contrast three different views on managing change along with identifying how managers
can manage change positively.
Discussions
The current understanding on resistance to change suggests that new scopes of
investigations are possible and therefore, Ford and Ford break the current notion on resistance
to change in three views of resistance including mechanistic, social and conversational views.
Under the mechanistic view, resistance to change is neutral and takes place due to some kind
of resistance. Accordingly, more resistance means change is bigger. From an organizational
perspective, common signs reflecting resistance to change include being late to meetings,
complaining, damaging equipment's, etc which might delay objectives behind the change
(Waddell, Creed, Cummings, & Worley, 2017, p. 105). Similarly, Daniel (2019) argues
that employee resists changing mostly when they feel change is unnecessary or are unaware
of the reasons behind the change. A lack of knowledge concerning how the change will affect
their work further makes employees resist to change. Specifically, employees with superior

P a g e | 2
posts and personalities find change more difficult as their processes and work-life reliability
is also affected.
Alternatively, the social view of resistance to change suggests that resistance to
change differs from organization to organization and different facts of them such as
perception towards culture and its effects on organizational performance. Unlike the
mechanistic view, social view posits that resistance can either be exceptional or detrimental
or remains omnipresent in the employees due to some of the existing factors. Under the social
view, resistance to change can be a response to those factors also which are not a part of the
change at all. It can be noted that under some situation’s individuals can show resistance not
because of change but because of their complaining attitude or for showing a response
towards it (Waddell, Creed, Cummings, & Worley, 2017). Change process in every
organization is unique in its way because of differences in business and organizational nature,
value and culture, leadership and management style and finally, employee’s behaviour and
attitude. Mansor, Mat, Abu, & Johari (2013) indicated that a person's attitude reflects the way
he/she think or perform negatively or positively. Complex attitude can comprise three
tendencies such as affective, cognitive and behavioural where any kind of attitude may
induce person support or resist organizational change management. However, the
conversational view states that change perspectives shared with an organizational group can
act as a catalyst or perpetrator to resistance to change.
Conversational view of resistance to change recognises conversation and change
effects on an organization which can be based upon factors like sequential, simultaneous and
recursive conversations adopted by different networks in the workplace. This makes difficult
for a change agent or a manager to establish a common communication network besides the
creation of unwanted misinterpretations of key messages. The conversational view can be
compared to a mechanistic view to some extent as both the views recognises individual