Every leader eventually meets the same person. Arms folded in the meeting. The one who says “we tried this before” before you have finished the sentence. The one whose email replies get a little shorter each time the project is mentioned. It is tempting to label this person difficult, negative, or stuck. It is also, usually, the wrong diagnosis.

This is a different problem to the one explored in How do I lead change when people agree in public but resist in private? That article dealt with quiet, invisible withdrawal, the polite nodding that hides private disengagement. Overt resistance is louder and, in some ways, more useful. The person objecting out loud is still in the conversation. They have not yet decided to disappear. The leadership task is not to silence them or win the argument. It is to understand what their resistance is protecting, and to respond in a way that turns friction into information rather than into conflict.

Behavioural science over the last few years has sharpened this picture considerably. It suggests that resistance is rarely a character flaw, that not all resisters need the same response, and that leaders themselves are frequently a bigger driver of resistance than the change itself.

Resistance is not the opposite of engagement

The oldest and most persistent assumption in change management is that resistance is irrational, something located entirely inside the person who is doing it. Ford and Ford’s influential critique challenged this directly, arguing that change agents routinely contribute to the resistance they complain about through their own decisions, omissions and communication failures, and that resistance functions as a resource rather than an obstacle (Ford and Ford, 2008). Seen this way, an employee’s objection is feedback about the change itself, not simply a problem with the employee.

More recent research reinforces this. A 2024 study of participatory practice during organisational change found that when employees were given genuine opportunities to shape a change rather than simply receive it, what looked like resistance often converted into constructive input, and that the presence of open dissent was frequently a sign of a healthier, more trusting change process than the absence of any dissent at all (Sahay and Goldthwaite, 2024).

This reframe matters practically. If you treat every objection as a discipline problem, you will spend your energy correcting people instead of learning from them. Behaviours commonly labelled as resistance, questioning, hesitating, arguing, working strictly to rule, quietly slowing down, are frequently early signals of something specific the change has not yet addressed: a flaw in the plan, a genuine risk you have not seen, or a cost to someone’s role that has not been acknowledged. The first move with a resisting team member is not to persuade them. It is to find out what they know that you do not.

The hidden logic behind resistance

Even when you ask, people often cannot fully explain why they are resisting. This is not evasiveness. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s research on what they call “immunity to change” found that people frequently hold a sincere, stated commitment to a goal alongside an equally powerful, unstated competing commitment that works against it, an internal system that quietly protects them from a hidden fear (Kegan and Lahey, 2009). They described it as having one foot on the gas and one on the brake, and not fully realising the brake is on.

A team member who says they support the new reporting process, but who never quite finds time to learn it, may have a competing commitment to protecting their reputation as reliable and error-free. Learning something new, in public, risks looking incompetent in front of people who currently see them as the expert. The stated goal is genuine. So is the hidden brake.

This means the most useful question a leader can ask a resisting team member is rarely “why won’t you do this?” It is closer to: what would you be worried about, or risk losing, if you fully committed to this change tomorrow? Asked with curiosity rather than challenge, this question surfaces the competing commitment directly, and it is very hard to address a fear nobody has been allowed to name.

Not every resister needs the same response

One of the more practically useful pieces of recent research comes from a 2024 study of 427 employees going through a transformation in a steel manufacturing company. Using latent profile analysis, the researchers identified six distinct profiles of organisational readiness for change: Proactives, Acceptors, Opens, Neutrals, Reluctants and Deniers (Köhler, Ritter and Kauffeld, 2024). These groups differed significantly not just in attitude but in outcomes, including job satisfaction and intention to leave.

The finding with the most leadership relevance is this: employees’ optimism and, more importantly, how fair they perceived the process to be, in both interpersonal treatment and the quality of information they received, predicted which profile they landed in. Fairness, not enthusiasm, was the lever.

This matters because leaders often make a costly allocation error. They pour disproportionate time into the loudest, most entrenched Deniers, hoping to convert them, while the much larger and more persuadable middle, the Neutrals, Reluctants and Opens, receives comparatively little attention. The research suggests the opposite investment strategy works better. Deniers are the least likely group to shift regardless of effort. Opens and Acceptors, by contrast, can be moved toward becoming genuine change champions relatively efficiently, and their credibility with peers who are still undecided is disproportionately high.

Practically, this means diagnosing before you respond. A team member who is cautiously asking hard questions (Reluctant or Neutral) needs a very different conversation to one who has flatly declared the change wrong and is actively undermining it (Denier). Treating both the same, either with equal warmth or equal firmness, wastes effort on the person least likely to change and under-serves the people most likely to.

When it isn’t about this change at all

Sometimes what looks like resistance to a specific initiative is actually accumulated exhaustion from all the initiatives that came before it. Harvard Business Review’s Ron Carucci points out that many leaders unintentionally manufacture the very change fatigue they later blame on their teams, by launching new initiatives without integrating or closing out the old ones, by failing to sequence competing priorities, and by underestimating how much emotional bandwidth repeated disruption consumes (Carucci, 2024). The average employee now experiences roughly ten planned organisational changes a year, up from around two in 2016, and a majority of professionals report feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change in their organisation.

If a normally cooperative team member suddenly resists a change that, on its own merits, seems entirely reasonable, it is worth asking a different question before assuming defiance: how many other changes are they absorbing right now, and has anyone acknowledged that load? Carucci’s research suggests the leader’s own pattern of introducing change without regard for sequencing is frequently the hidden variable. In these cases, the fix is not a better pitch for this particular change. It is reducing or resequencing the total change burden so people have the capacity to engage with any of it.

Five ways to respond, grounded in the research

1. Ask what the resistance is protecting

Before responding to the objection on the surface, ask about what sits beneath it. Kegan and Lahey’s work suggests direct, curious questions, what would this cost you, what are you worried you would lose, work far better than trying to out-argue the stated objection, because the stated objection is rarely the real one (Kegan and Lahey, 2009).

2. Diagnose the profile before you invest your energy

Notice whether you are dealing with someone testing the change (Reluctant, Neutral) or someone who has already decided against it and is recruiting others to their view (Denier). Invest disproportionately in the movable middle. The research indicates this is both the fairer and the more efficient use of leadership time (Köhler, Ritter and Kauffeld, 2024).

3. Lead with fairness, not persuasion

Across multiple studies, perceived fairness, being treated with respect and being given honest, complete information, consistently reduces resistance more reliably than enthusiasm or incentives (Rehman et al., 2021; Köhler, Ritter and Kauffeld, 2024). If a team member’s resistance is met with defensiveness or a sense that decisions were made behind closed doors, no amount of persuasive language will compensate. Answer the hard questions honestly, including the ones without a comfortable answer.

4. Anchor the change in what stays the same

Recent behavioural economics research found that emphasising continuity, what remains the same, alongside a single clear, credible reason for the specific new element, reduced resistance more effectively than framing the change as a bold transformation. The researchers noted that advertising radical change can itself increase resistance by activating exactly the loss aversion leaders are trying to avoid (McLaren et al., 2025). Tell your team member plainly what they keep, not only what changes.

5. Check whether the problem is fatigue, not this change

Before treating resistance as a signal about the initiative, audit the total change load the person is carrying. If they are absorbing several disruptions at once, the most useful leadership act may be sequencing and protection, not a better explanation of the benefits (Carucci, 2024).

The conversation itself

None of this replaces a direct, human conversation. The goal is not to manage the resistance away. It is to sit with the team member long enough to find out what they see that you do not, what they are protecting, and what would need to be true for them to move. That conversation will look different depending on whether you are talking to someone testing the water or someone who has already decided. It should always be grounded in genuine curiosity rather than persuasion dressed up as a question.

Self-reflection questions

  1. When you picture your most resistant team member, are you responding to what they are actually protecting, or only to what they are saying out loud?
  2. Are you spending most of your energy trying to convert the person least likely to move, at the expense of the larger group who could still be won over?
  3. Is this resistance really about the change in front of you, or about the cumulative weight of everything you have already asked this person to absorb this year?

Further reading & resources

Why Your Team Won’t Change: The Architecture of Behaviour – Kurt Lewin’s B = f(P, E) formula for diagnosing whether resistance sits with the person, the environment, or both.

How do I lead change when people agree in public but resist in private? – The companion problem: what to do when resistance goes underground instead of staying visible.

Debunking the leadership myth that people do not like change – Why “resistance” is frequently a rational response to loss, confusion or poor design rather than a dislike of change itself.

How can I get change to stick? (BJ Fogg’s B=MAP) – Once resistance eases, this framework explains how to make the new behaviour automatic rather than effortful.

How can I create a positive climate for organisational change? – The broader conditions of fairness and psychological safety that make individual resistance less likely to take root in the first place.

Inspiration:

Carucci, R. (2024) ‘Are you the cause of your team’s change fatigue?’, Harvard Business Review, 23 December.

Ford, J.D. and Ford, L.W. (2008) ‘Resistance to change: the rest of the story’, Academy of Management Review, 33(2), pp. 362–377.

Kegan, R. and Lahey, L.L. (2009) Immunity to change: how to overcome it and unlock potential in yourself and your organization. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

Köhler, A., Ritter, M. and Kauffeld, S. (2024) ‘A typology of organizational readiness for change based on a latent profile analysis’, Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1453836.

McLaren, T.A., Fein, E.C., Ireland, M. and Malhotra, A. (2025) ‘I’ll have what I had before, but with a cherry on top: leveraging status quo bias when introducing organizational change’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 38(8), pp. 50–70.

Rehman, N., Mahmood, A., Ibtasam, M., Murtaza, S.A., Iqbal, N. and Molnár, E. (2021) ‘The psychology of resistance to change: the antidotal effect of organizational justice, support and leader-member exchange’, Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 678952.

Sahay, S. and Goldthwaite, C. (2024) ‘Participatory practices during organizational change: rethinking participation and resistance’, Management Communication Quarterly, 38(2), pp. 279–306.