Organisational change management and workers’ behaviour: A critical review

Abstract

Change is the only constant phenomenon. An organisation that fails to recognise the inevitability of change is doomed to fail. However, workers’ behaviour towards change has become a serious issue facing today’s management in complex and ever evolving organisations. Employees’ resistance to change has been identified as a critical contributor to the failure of many well-intended and well-conceived efforts to initiate change within the organisation. This paper therefore examines the reasons for workers’ resistance to change as well as the impact of organisational change on workers’ behaviour within the workplace and how organisations can manage change processes in order to elicit the right and anticipated behaviour from workers in line with the changing business needs. The theoretical synthesis of thoughts drawn from the tenets of the “Individual Perspectives School” and “the Group Dynamics School” is the basis for the explication of the dynamics of organisational change and workers’ attitude towArds it. This paper contends that securing the support and cooperation of workers through obtaining the right and anticipated behaviour is critical today as ever to the successful implementation of change programmes in organisations.