Re: Resistance to change LO677

DZITEK (dzitek@smtplink.ccm.edu)
Tue, 04 Apr 95 12:49:50 EST

Hi,

I've been reading with curiosity the dialogue on resistance to change.
Four years ago, the college where I work announced several major
changes and eliminated 8 percent of its administrative staff. I had
just started graduate school at the time and used the opportunity to
mix research with reality and to study behavior changes in the
organization. My master's thesis was on communication barriers to
planned change.
Your dialogue has been a great reality check for me because we went
through, and still are going through, a lot of confusion. Here are
just of few of my discoveries.
1) People became insatiable for information. What they didn't get
they made up. People like to fill the void with grapevine information
and by the time the real word gets out, they question it because they
have already formed a mental model. The formal communication is
usually so sanitized that no one believes it anyway.
2)There's a big psychological difference between feeling like
your being "pushed" into the future instead of being
"pulled" into the future. I guess that's were a leader with a good
ability to articulate vision is valuable.
3) Management likes to "sell" the solution. But if people really
don't believe that a problem existed, they're not likely to buy the
solution. Perhaps we should spend at least 75 percent of the time
examining and communicating the "problem" and the other 25 percent
talking about solutions.
4) One piece of research data was from a National Public Radio
interview with the Wyatt Co., who said their research indicated that
downsizing fails when companies don't pay enough attention to the
"people side of change". That was certainly the came here.
5) I found a much higher level of commitment to the change for those
people who saw some personal opportunities attached to it.
I ended up with about 4 different levels of commitment. 1) the
visionaries: those who created the vision of the future. 2) the
enthusiastic followers: those who didn't see it as clearly but saw
some new opportunities for themselves. 3) Unenthusiastic followers:
those who never saw the problem in the first place and don't believe
in the vision. 4) unchangeable: those who only had a mental picture of
the past.
5) As time goes on, more top level management are verbally abandoning
the change efforts. So even the good soldiers don't know what to
think.
6) WHO HUNTS WERE COMMON. Change always carries a degree of risk and
very few people were willing to take the risk because most people were
not rewarded for it. Most people were rewarded for doing the same old
thing.

I love to hear your comments.

I knew that 100 page master's thesis would come in handy some day.

Diane Zitek - DZITEK@CCM.EDU
County College of Morris, Randolph, New Jersey