Assignment 3 - Resistance To Change And How To Cope With It

Business Studies

Assignment 3   Resistance to Change

One of the biggest challenges associated with change is that people are often resistant to changes, even if the changes are an improvement over the current state. It is management’s job as change agents to help others to cope with resistance to change, and in the best case, to readily accept the change and understand how it is for the betterment of the organization. Everyone may react to a change differently, so management is not going to be able to use a general approach to helping employees cope with change.

Activity Resources

Main Task: Overcome Resistance to Change

You will be exploring barriers and resistance to change and strategies in the face of these issues in a paper. Explain how management might cope with resistance to change. Examples include the use of positive incentives to encourage employees to accept the change or managerial consideration for unfreezing acceptance of the status quo by removing restraining forces. Employees could be counseled individually. Each employee’s concerns and apprehensions should be heard and specifically clarified. Assuming that most of the fears are unjustified, the counselor could assure the employees that there was nothing to fear and then demonstrate, through tangible evidence, that restraining forces are unwarranted. If resistance is extremely high, management may have to resort to both reducing resistance and increasing the attractiveness of the alternative if the unfreezing is to be successful. Conceive and justify a plan that would apply the concepts of change management in overcoming employee resistance to change.