Engaging resistance: Approaches to surmounting impediments to organizational transformation

Most organizational transformation efforts are buffeted by resistance. While the literature suggests some steps for change or stages to transformation, very few empirical works detail how to successfully navigate through such resistance. This study examines how successful change champions experience and interpret resistance behavior during organizational transformation. A theoretical foundation for engaging resistance is established to describe how change champions deploy tactics and strategies to mitigate resistance to their transformation efforts.; This study focuses on six cases of resistance embedded within the larger context of organizational transformations at a small, rural, private liberal arts college and a large, comprehensive, urban, public university. Within these cases, rigorous examination of champion and resistor behavior reveal both the nature of resistance and the approaches used to engage and surmount that resistance. The conceptual framework centers on the institutional contexts, the nature of the transformations, the forms of and responses to resistance, and was designed to explain how champions' planned for and engaged resistance.; The six cases of resistance were examined using comparative case method and a grounded theory analysis technique. A total of 65 participants in these transformations were interviewed, including faculty members, staff and students. Both leaders of and resistors to these transformations were interviewed. Rigorous coding of the semi-structured interviews and an archival analysis of about 400 documents was carried out.; Results include the identification of ten salient forms of resistance and thirteen different successful engagement approaches. A discussion of the nature of resistance describes the targets, intensity, and identifies nine sources or causes of resistance. The engagement approaches are parsed into three periods that explain how change champions work to effectively surmount resistance by means of good planning practice, powerful diplomacy, and working with remaining resistors. The phenomena of "positive pull" and "negative bounce" are introduced. That is, these data suggest that champions are likely have positive or negative effect on resistor behavior if they deploy an engagement approach that is considered correspondingly positive or negative by resistors. Positive pull mitigates resistance by building support for and participation in a transformation. Negative bounce tends to sustain or exacerbate existing resistance.