The resistance to change myth: what if resistance isn’t the problem?

“We’re encountering resistance”

Few phrases travel through a change programme as quickly as “we’re encountering resistance”. A new structure is announced, a system goes live, or a different way of working is introduced. Some people question it. Others continue using the old process. Deadlines slip. Workarounds appear. Managers report that their teams are not bought in. Before long, the diagnosis arrives: people are resisting the change. It is a plausible diagnosis. Sometimes it is even accurate. But it also does something subtle. A collection of behaviours that might have prompted inquiry becomes a category that appears to explain them. Before the label, we have people questioning, delaying, disagreeing, adapting or continuing to work in ways we expected to stop. Once we call those behaviours resistance, the next question follows almost automatically: how do we overcome it? This connects closely to another leadership myth I have explored, the idea that people simply do not like change. The argument here is slightly different. Even when people genuinely are pushing back against a change, describing them as resistant can encourage us to locate the problem in the people rather than remain curious about what is actually happening. The problem is not recognising resistance. It is allowing the label to become the explanation.

Why the resistance story is so appealing

The idea has survived for good reason. People really can resist change. Some of us like routine more than others. We can worry about losing status, competence, relationships or control. We become attached to ways of working that have served us well. Sometimes we disagree with what leaders have decided to do, or the new way requires considerable effort while the old way still works perfectly well from where we sit. Oreg (2003) developed a measure of dispositional resistance to change around four tendencies: routine seeking, emotional reaction to imposed change, short-term focus and cognitive rigidity. His work matters because it prevents us replacing one oversimplification with another. It would be just as misleading to argue that resistance has nothing to do with the person as it is to assume that resistance resides entirely within them. Oreg’s later organisational research found that both personality and organisational context were associated with people’s reactions to a large-scale change (Oreg, 2006). A wider review by Oreg, Vakola and Armenakis (2011), covering 60 years of quantitative research, identified antecedents associated with the individual, the organisational context, the change process, perceived benefit or harm, and the nature of the change itself. Yet the individualised story remains attractive because it turns something messy into something manageable. A sensible change has been designed; some people are resisting it; the implementation task is therefore to overcome their resistance. Once framed that way, the change itself and the conditions surrounding it receive far less scrutiny.

Where did the idea of resistance to change come from?

The history of “resistance to change” is more interesting than the simplified version sometimes repeated in change-management writing.

Kurt Lewin did use the language of resistance to change. In his work on group dynamics, Lewin (1947) discussed “constancy and resistance to change” as part of his broader thinking about social fields and quasi-stationary equilibria. Behaviour was understood in relation to forces acting within a social situation. The question was not simply why an individual refused to move, but what combination of forces was maintaining the existing state.

A year later, Lester Coch and John French brought the phrase directly into organisational research with their influential paper Overcoming Resistance to Change (Coch and French, 1948). Their research at the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation examined what happened when changes in jobs and working methods generated grievances, turnover, reduced efficiency and aggression towards management. The title suggests a familiar management problem, but the study itself is more interesting. Coch and French did not simply conclude that some employees were resistant personalities. Their explanation included individual frustration and group forces, and their experiments varied the degree to which employees participated in the change. Greater participation was associated with less resistance and faster recovery of productivity. Burnes (2015) later argued that the significance of the research lies partly in recognising that resistance arose from the context in which change took place, not simply from the individuals experiencing it. As the phrase travelled through management writing, its meaning gradually narrowed. Zander (1950) explored resistance partly through a psychological lens, while Lawrence (1954) offered a more relational account, arguing that employees could be responding not to the technical change itself but to its social consequences and to the behaviour of those introducing it.

Dent and Goldberg (1999) nevertheless identified an important overall shift. What began in Lewin’s work as a way of thinking about forces within a social field increasingly became something located inside the people expected to change. A phenomenon to be explained had gradually become an attribute of the people displaying it.

Resistance is a label, not an explanation

Piderit (2000) challenged another assumption embedded in conventional accounts of resistance: the idea that someone’s response to change can be placed neatly somewhere on a line between support and opposition. She proposed instead that responses have cognitive, emotional and behavioural dimensions, and these do not necessarily point in the same direction.

A senior manager might believe that a restructuring makes strategic sense while feeling considerable sadness about losing a team she has spent years building. She might worry about her own place in the new organisation while still working hard to make the restructuring succeed. Another manager may speak enthusiastically about a transformation while six months later very little about how his team actually works has changed. Which one is resistant?

Piderit’s (2000) argument about ambivalence matters because cognitive agreement does not guarantee emotional enthusiasm, anxiety does not necessarily produce opposition, and behavioural compliance does not necessarily indicate commitment. Once these possibilities are reduced to “supportive” or “resistant”, potentially useful information disappears. There is a parallel here with the leadership myth that change moves through predictable stages. Both give leaders a simple language for interpreting something that is much less tidy in practice.

The person resisting may not be of one mind

Much change-management language also assumes a relatively unified person: leaders explain the change, the individual decides whether they support it, and their behaviour follows. Real people are rarely that tidy. A manager might believe that a more collaborative operating model is strategically necessary while having spent twenty years being rewarded for taking control. She might genuinely want to delegate more while being known throughout the organisation as the person who always has the answer. Under normal conditions she experiments with new behaviour; under pressure she returns immediately to what has worked before.

Piderit (2000) gives us ambivalence. Amiot et al. (2006) show how organisational change can affect identification and belonging. Fugate, Kinicki and Prussia (2008) show the importance of appraisal and coping. Together they point towards responses that are considerably more complex than a simple decision to support or resist.

This also connects with Wayshaping, particularly its idea of the self-collective. Habits, identities, narratives and intentions can pull in different directions. Wayshaping is not empirical proof of why people resist change, but it offers a useful way of thinking about the complexity within the person that the label “resistant” can obscure.

What if the change process is helping to create the resistance?

The lens now needs to widen beyond the individual.

Ford, Ford and D’Amelio (2008) challenged the one-sided nature of much resistance literature. Conventional accounts tend to place change agents on one side and resistant recipients on the other, with the change agent assumed to be acting rationally and the recipient’s response treated as the problem. They argued that the actions and inactions of change agents themselves can contribute to the responses they subsequently encounter. This does not mean leaders cause all resistance. It means the way change is introduced belongs inside our explanation.

Wanberg and Banas (2000), studying employees experiencing workplace reorganisation, found greater openness to change associated with factors including information, participation and change-related self-efficacy. Lines (2004) similarly found that participation in strategic change was associated with lower resistance and greater organisational commitment, although the relationship also depended on wider factors.

Trust matters too. Rousseau and Tijoriwala (1999) found that employees did not simply accept management’s official explanation for why change was necessary. Their interpretations were influenced by factors including trust in management and the beliefs of colleagues. This matters because organisations often treat communication as transmission. Leaders have explained the business case, held the town hall and circulated the slides, so the change has been communicated. But people respond not only to the change leaders intended. They respond to what they experience and to the meaning they make of it. A workforce that has experienced three abandoned transformations in five years hears “this time is different” differently from one experiencing its first major change. Someone involved in shaping a new process may also experience it very differently from someone who first encounters it after the main decisions have already been made.

If trust has already been damaged, I explore that more directly in how to rebuild trust and resilience after team change.

What if the system is producing the behaviour?

Imagine that an organisation introduces a new process. Six months later, one part of the business is still using the old one. The obvious explanation is that the team is resisting the change. Look more closely, however, and the new process takes longer. The performance system still rewards outcomes produced by the old behaviour. Another department the team depends on has not adopted the new process. The IT system makes the new workflow cumbersome. A senior executive continues asking for a report produced under the old system. Informal routines developed over many years continue to make the old way easier.

At this point, asking why the people will not change is unlikely to tell us enough. The more useful question is what is producing the pattern we are seeing. This is where Estuarine Mapping adds something different. Rather than starting with an idealised future state and asking how to push people towards it, Estuarine Mapping begins with present conditions. What constraints are holding existing patterns in place? Which can move relatively easily? Which are difficult to change? Where might an intervention alter what becomes possible?

Howard-Grenville’s (2005) research on organisational routines similarly showed how behaviour reflected an interaction between individual agency and organisational context. The individual is not always the most useful unit of analysis. This becomes especially important when change crosses organisational boundaries. In matrix environments, a manager may intend to adopt a new way of working while reporting relationships, incentives and dependencies continue to pull in another direction. That connects closely to the challenges I explore in leading without formal authority.

Resistance can sometimes be information

The argument becomes more significant when change is taking place in a genuinely complex environment. In predictable situations, deviation from a well-designed process may simply indicate an implementation problem. Complex situations are different. Interdependencies and changing conditions mean that leaders cannot know all the consequences of an intervention before they act.

Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld (2005) describe sensemaking as an ongoing process through which people interpret ambiguous situations and act on those interpretations. Uhl-Bien, Marion and McKelvey (2007) similarly argue that adaptive outcomes in complex settings can emerge through interaction rather than being fully directed through formal authority. Research on organisational routines reinforces this. Pentland, Hærem and Hillison (2011) found substantial variation within apparently stable routines, while Howard-Grenville (2005) showed how local enactment was shaped by both agency and context. What an organisation designs and what happens in practice are not necessarily the same thing.

Workarounds provide a tangible example. When employees find ways around a centrally mandated system, the behaviour can look like non-compliance. Yet workarounds can sometimes arise because the formal system does not fit local working conditions. In those situations, failure to adopt may reveal something important about the relationship between the intervention and the environment in which it is being used. That does not make workarounds automatically wise, safe or useful. Nor does it give local employees a veto. It means that unexpected responses deserve inquiry before they are dismissed as obstacles.

This connects with collective sensemaking and with my work on using pilots, probes and experiments when leading in complexity. If leaders cannot know enough in advance to design a perfect intervention, surprising responses become part of how they learn what the intervention is actually doing.

Sometimes the change needs to change

Once leaders investigate the response rather than simply trying to eliminate it, several possibilities open up. People may not understand why the change matters, in which case clarity is needed. They may lack capability or confidence, in which case support and practice matter. The implementation process may be creating unnecessary opposition. Organisational systems or incentives may make the requested behaviour irrational. And occasionally people have identified something wrong with the change itself. This connects directly to the myth that change goes through predictable stages. If complex change cannot always be mapped reliably in advance, leaders should expect to discover things during implementation that could not have been known when the plan was created. Sometimes that should change the way the intervention is delivered. Occasionally it should change the intervention itself. The map matters, but so does what happens when the terrain turns out not to match it.

But not all resistance is wise

There is an obvious danger in this argument. “Resistance is information” can become every bit as simplistic as “resistance must be overcome”. Sometimes people oppose change because it threatens their status. Sometimes the old way is simply more comfortable. Sometimes they do not want to invest the effort needed to learn something new. Sometimes someone has misunderstood the situation or is working from incomplete information. Oreg’s (2003; 2006) research also reminds us that individual dispositions genuinely matter. And sometimes leaders have listened carefully, understood the objections and should proceed anyway.

Participation does not mean consensus. Listening does not grant everyone a veto. A systems perspective does not absolve individuals of responsibility, and complexity does not mean leaders cannot make decisions. There is a similar danger in the familiar claim that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Memorable ideas can become so explanatory that they discourage us from investigating the mechanisms actually operating. “Resistance” can do that. So can “the system”. The alternative to overcoming resistance is not accepting every objection. It is understanding what you are dealing with before deciding what needs to change.

What leaders can do instead

So what does this mean in practice? Instead of asking how to overcome resistance, leaders can start by looking more carefully at what is producing it. Five shifts help:

1. Describe before you diagnose: Start with what you can actually observe. “Sarah is resistant to the transformation” is an interpretation. “Sarah continues using the previous forecasting process, has questioned the assumptions behind the new one in three meetings and has not moved her team onto the new reporting template” gives you something to investigate. This makes it easier to distinguish disagreement, anxiety, lack of capability, conflicting incentives, legitimate concern and straightforward unwillingness to change.

2. Ask what makes the response reasonable: Ask what the world looks like from where the other person is standing. Given what they know, value, fear, experience and are rewarded for, what could make this response make sense? Reasonable” does not mean correct. The response may rest on an assumption that needs challenging or a misunderstanding that needs correcting. The point is to discover which.

3. Look beyond the individual: Examine the conditions surrounding the behaviour. What is being rewarded? What becomes harder if the person adopts the new way of working? Which other teams need to change? What routines still reinforce the old behaviour? What formal and informal relationships matter? Do not ask only what behaviour you want. Ask what currently makes the existing behaviour persist.

4. Separate signal from preference: Not every objection should change the intervention. Leaders still need to distinguish between a response that reveals a genuine constraint, risk or unintended consequence and one that primarily reflects discomfort, preference or disagreement. What should be addressed? What should be acknowledged but not accommodated? Where is firmer leadership required?

5. Keep sensing after you act: Change something, observe what happens and remain alert to unintended effects. In predictable situations, this may simply confirm that the intervention worked. In complex ones, it may reveal something that could not have been known beforehand. The shift is from trying to eliminate resistance as quickly as possible to understanding the response well enough to decide intelligently what should move.

Five questions before you call someone resistant

When a person or group appears to be resisting change, five questions can help keep the inquiry open:

1. What have I actually observed, before interpreting it as resistance?
2. What might make this response reasonable from where they sit?
3. How might the way we are introducing the change be contributing to the response?
4. What organisational conditions or constraints are helping reproduce the behaviour?
5. What might this response be telling us about the change itself?

You may still conclude that someone is resisting a necessary change and that clearer expectations, stronger support, firmer consequences or more direct leadership are required. The difference is that resistance becomes the conclusion of an inquiry rather than its starting point.

Resistance to change is real. The myth is believing that naming it explains it.

People do resist change. The useful challenge is not to replace that statement with another slogan such as “people don’t resist change, they resist loss” or “resistance is always valuable feedback”. Both risk being as reductive as the idea they are intended to replace.

The research offers a more nuanced picture. Individual differences matter (Oreg, 2003; 2006). People’s cognitive, emotional and behavioural responses may pull in different directions (Piderit, 2000). Participation, information and confidence in coping influence openness to change (Wanberg and Banas, 2000). Trust affects how people interpret why change is happening (Rousseau and Tijoriwala, 1999). Change agents themselves may contribute to the responses they subsequently describe as resistance (Ford, Ford and D’Amelio, 2008).

Sometimes the issue sits largely with the individual. Sometimes it lies in how the change has been introduced. Sometimes trust, identity, relationships, incentives, or organisational constraints reproduce the behaviour. And sometimes people closest to the work have discovered something about the proposed change that its designers could not have known beforehand. The leadership task is to work out which. Calling someone resistant can feel like an explanation. It may actually mark the point at which inquiry stopped.

If you enjoyed this, you may want to explore other posts in the series that Challenge Myths and Explore Leadership.

References

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