Special issue on Resistance to change: redefining and resituating its role in change management

Citation

(2010), "Special issue on Resistance to change: redefining and resituating its role in change management", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 23 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2010.02323faa.001

Special issue on Resistance to change: redefining and resituating its role in change management

Special issue on Resistance to change: redefining and resituating its role in change management

Article Type: Call for papers From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 23, Issue 6

Guest EditorsDonna M. Carlon, Alexis Downs and Stacia Wert-Gray

As Ford et al. (2008) point out, much of the research regarding resistance to change in organizations has focused on its irrationality and unreasonableness. This perspective pits change agents against change recipients, demanding a win/lose strategy to resolve the conflict. Resistance is portrayed as the enemy of change, even though dissent can play a positive role in many other areas of management (Schultz-Hardt et al., 2002; Nemeth et al., 2001). In this special issue of JOCM, we would like to expand the dialogue surrounding the nature of resistance to change in organizations and invite papers that explore its role in effective change management. What can we learn if resistance is treated as an essential element of change rather than something to be squashed?

Piderit (2000) suggested that too much change scholarship has focused on the negative aspects of resistance, and in the process overly-simplified it as a dichotomous event. She proposed a more complex definition of resistance involving emotional, cognitive, and intentional responses. Rather than defining resistance as "always bad,'' i.e. negative responses in all three dimensions, Piderit (2000) contended that responses to change are rarely consistently all negative (or all positive).

Resistance to organizational change is seen as a complex mixture of context, attitudes, and processes by Macri et al. (2002). The authors demonstrated that change scholarship can explore all three levels of resistance, rather than just one, as seems to be the case with most empirical studies (Macri et al., 2002, p. 292).

We invite articles that are conceptual in nature, presenting a case for complete redefinition of resistance and change, or complementary, extending current lines of change scholarship. The Guest Editors encourage interdisciplinary and international contributions.

Bibliography

Ford, J.D., Ford, L.W. and D'Amelio, A. (2008), "Resistance to change: the rest of the story'', Academy of Management Review, Vol. 33,pp. 362-77.

Macri, D. M., Tagliaventi, M.R. and Bertolotti, F. (2002), "A grounded theory for resistance to change in a small organization'', Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15, pp. 292-310.

Nemeth, C.J., Connell, J.B., Rogers, J.D. and Brown, K.S. (2001). "Improving decision making by means of dissent'', Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 31, pp. 48-58.

Piderit, S. K. (2000), "Rethinking resistance and recognizing ambivalence: a multidimensional view of attitudes toward an organizational change'', Academy of Management Review, Vol. 25,pp. 783-94.

Schulz-Hardt, S., Jochims, M. and Frey, D. (2002), "Productive conflict in group decision making: genuine and contrived dissent as strategies to counteract biased information seeking'', Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, Vol. 88, pp. 563-86.