Overcoming employee resistance to internally driven organisational changes

Abstract

In recent years, organisational changes have become a norm because of factors such as globalisation, innovation, and rapid technological changes. Organisations must be flexible to be sustainable and gain competitive advantage. The recent COVID-19 outbreak has also necessitated organisations to restructure the way they do business to respond to the negative impact that the pandemic brought to businesses. Despite organisational changes becoming common, the implementation of change initiatives in organisations are said to be mostly unsuccessful. These failures cost organisations large amounts of money. One of the known reasons why organisational changes fail is employee resistance to organisational changes. Employees are key in the implementation of organisational changes and their buyin is crucial for the successful implementation of internally driven organisational changes. The objective of this research was to explore ways in which leaders encourage employees to enthusiastically adopt internally driven organisational changes. A qualitative study was done which focused on employees in the professional accounting and consulting sector in South Africa. The data was collected from fourteen employees using semi-structured interviews. The study revealed that employee resistance can be a product of various factors such as lack of, or poor communication, exclusion of employees from the change process, perceived negative impact of the change to employees, fear of job losses and perceived benefit of the changes to the organisation. Furthermore, the study revealed that social identity plays a crucial role in encouraging employees to enthusiastically adopt organisational changes. Employees who felt like the needs of their social groups were considered during the implementation of organisational changes did not resist the changes. Lastly, the findings showed that leaders play an important role in influencing employee attitudes for internally driven organisational changes.