1. Rethinking Resistance and
Recognizing Ambivalence:
A Multidimensional View of
Attitudes toward an
Organizational Change

2. INTRODUCTION
KEY POINTS:
• Resistance to change
• Advocate new research based on a reconceptualization of individual
responses to change as multidimensional attitudes.
CHALLENGING QUESTION:
• How can we balance the organizational need to foster ambivalent
attitudes toward change and the individual need to minimize the
potentially debilitating effects of ambivalence?
TAKE AWAY:
• Realizing the importance of examining the evolution of employee
responses to change over time and the need to understand responses to
change proposals that emerge from bottom-up, egalitarian change
processes.

3. MULTIDIMENSIONAL VIEW OF RESPONSES
TO PROPOSED ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES
• Emotional Response
• Cognitive Response
• Intentional Response

4. BACK

5. SOME CONCEPTS
• RESISTANCE TO A CHANGE (set of responses to
change that are negative along all three dimensions)
• SUPPORT FOR A CHANGE (set of responses that are
positive along all three dimensions)
• AMBIVALENCE IN EMPLOYEES (Responses to a
change initiative that are neither consistently negative nor
consistently positive

6. CONCEPTS OF RESISTANCE TO
CHANGE
 Restraining force moving in the direction of maintaining the status quo
 Forces that lead employees away from supporting changes proposed
by managers.
 According to managers’ perception it is a negative force which makes
employees disobedient.
 Individuals’ possessing power actively oppose initiatives of othe
agents.
 Resistance might be motivated by:
 Ethical principles
 Selfishness
 For seeking attention of top management
 Resistance may serve as a threat for middle management for their job
security.

7. TRIPARTITE VIEW OF RESISTANCE
 COGNITIVE
 An individual's beliefs about the attitude object.
 This belief can be strongly positive or strongly negative
 EMOTIONAL
 An individual's feelings in response to the attitude object.
 Emotions can be strongly positive(happiness/excitement) or
strongly negative(anger/fear)
 BEHAVIOURAL
 An individual’s feelings, moods, emotions, in response to an
attitude object
 Positive intention to support change or negative intentions to
oppose change.

8. TWO APPROACHES
 THEORY X
Top – down Approach
 THEORY Y
Bottom – up approach

9. BACK

11. BEHAVIOURAL RESISTANCE
 Resistance is a particular kind of action or inaction
 Resistance is intentional acts of commission (defiance) or omission.
 Resistance is the willingness to deceive authorities.
 Forces that they believed produced frustration in employees and
caused the undesirable behaviors.

12. AMBIVALENCE
AMBIVALENCE refers to
• Incongruent Emotions(simultaneous occurrence of fear and
excitement)
• Occurrence of cognitive response to change in conflict with emotional
response
• Intentional Ambivalence –supporting change in public but opposing
change anonymously

13. Unfavorable responses to change
might be motivated by the best
of intentions.
A SYNTHESIS OF
PAST Varying emphasis in the
CONCEPTUAL- Conceptualization Of
IZATIONS Resistance
OF RESISTANCE
TO CHANGE Cognitive - Beliefs
Emotional -Feelings
Behavior - Evaluations
Theory X and Theory Y

14. As defined by (Eagly and Chaiken)
Cognitive - "beliefs express positive or
negative evaluation of greater or lesser
extremity, and occasionally are exactly
A NEW VIEW neutral in their evaluative content“
OF Emotional – “feelings, moods, emotions,
RESPONSES and sympathetic nervous-system activity
TO CHANGE: that people have experienced in relation
AMBIVALENT to an attitude object and subsequently
ATTITUDES associate with it"
Behavior - past behaviors and future
intentions to act. OR
Loose connection of intentions with
other dimensions of attitudes

15. 1. A multidimensional view of responses to proposed
change may enhance our accuracy in predicting
employee behaviors that have been difficult to
predict in past research.
2. Degree of ambivalence in an employee's attitude
may have both desirable and undesirable
IMPLICATIONS consequences.
FOR 3. The need to expand our research beyond our past
RESEARCH focus on top-down organizational change.
AND 4. Employee responses to change may evolve over
PRACTICE time, and paying attention to this evolution might
yield insights about how to manage change
initiatives successfully.
5. Scholars who wish to understand the full range of
individual responses to proposed organizational
changes should assess those responses along
multiple dimensions.

16. CONCLUSION
A CHALLENGE
Helping organization members to reap the
benefits of ambivalence toward change for
organizations while minimizing its
potentially stressful effects for individuals.