John V. Mullane’s research while affiliated with Arizona State University and other places

Executive Overview Due to the stress of operating in increasingly dynamic environments, organizations are under tremendous pressure to fundamentally change the way they do business. Restructuring, rightsizing. and re-engineering all represent attempts to implement fundamental change. Unfortunately, many companies fail to achieve the results promised by these approaches because their members resist and the change attempt is aborted. This article focuses on overcoming the resistance that resides with the mindsets of organizational members—managers and employees alike. This article goes beyond simple advice for increased education and communication to explore why people fear and resist change. We offer six suggestions on how to avoid and, when necessary, overcome resistance in order to realize lasting fundamental change. In the past, managers had two choices for implementing fundamental change: they could use either incremental or revolutionary processes. For most firms in dynamic environments, incremental change is too minor and revolutionary change is too devastating. To achieve the optimal magnitude of change, we propose a new, vitally different implementation mode. We call this change process tectonic to evoke a seismic metaphor: organizational inertia is overcome, environmental stress is relieved, and outdated beliefs are destroyed while a new organizational identity is rebuilt on the foundation of the unique, enduring, and positive attributes of the organization.

This article presents a cognitive theory of why planned organizational change efforts, such as total quality initiatives, often fail. The theory suggests that employees resist total quality because their beliefs about the organization's identity constrain understanding and create cognitive opposition to radical change. We propose a dynamic model in which successful implementation of fundamental organizational transformation is partly dependent on management's ability to re-frame the change over time. Implementation may best be accomplished through a series of middle-range changes that are large enough to overcome cognitive inertia and relieve organizational stress, but not so large that members believe the proposed change is unobtainable or undesirable.