Managing Resistance to Change:

"Managing" resistance is one of the most taxing and disconcerting tasks faced through the organisations the world over. Organisations require being concerned about the feelings of people, understanding the causes of their resistance, and accordingly moderating their responses. Since a manager, you would be needed to master several strategies & approaches to moderate resistance. Kotter and Schlesinger (1978) have put forward six approaches to manage resistance to change:

• Education and communication;
• Involvement and participation;
• Facilitation and support;
• Negotiation and agreement;
• Manipulation and co-option; and
• Explicit and implicit coercion.

There are four practical steps which all managers could embark on to decrease dysfunctional anxieties & motivate constructive behaviour. Or else, failed change efforts would be extremely costly. Cost involves decreased employee loyalty, lower probability of achieving corporate targets, a waste of money & resources, and hard in fixing the failed change effort.

• Convince People: The first and probably the most significant step are to ensure which people understand emotionally, not intellectually, why they have to change.
• Build in Participation: A clear output from the research on modifies management is which employee participation raise individual ownership and excitement, &, in turn, decreases individual resistance to change.