Employees Resistance to Organizational Change Research Paper

Employees Resistance to Organizational Change - Research Paper Example of change studied in the paper are Lewin’s model, the Action Research Plan model and Kotter’s eight stages of organizational change.The paper will attempt to integrate the models with the concept of resistance and come up with meaningful conclusions. The above statement effectively summarises the context of this research interest, which deals with the concept of organizational change, with specific focus on employee resistance towards such a change in a given organization. A typical organization, according to research, goes through different forms of change, of which the most common are cost reduction, redundancies, culture change and performance improvement (Mullins 822; also see Brooks 98). The CIPD, Britain’s Chartered Institute of Personnel Development, in their own research, have given a more detailed set of circumstances which impose organizational change: challenges of growth; challenge of economic downturns and tougher trading conditions; changes in strategy; technological changes; competitive pressures including mergers and acquisitions; customer pressure; and government legislations (CIPD Change Management). Research suggests that previously, change was a planned phenomenon, and it was implemented on periodic bases by the organization as part of a strategic plan. In other words, an organization may strategically plan to implement changes every few years. But the volatile environments where modern businesses operate have changed the way this process is carried out, due to more rapid developments either inside or outside the organizations, which eventually force the organizations to implement changes (Hussey 9). Such developments have been referred to as ‘trigger events’, and Hussey argues that these events occur too fast for comfort in modern organizations (10). The author also explains that these events may be either opportunities or threats, and that the subsequent changes are the organizations’ way of reacting to these events, in order to