Possibilites to reduce the resistance to change in organisations

Academic Paper from the year 2014 in the subject Leadership and Human Resource Management - Miscellaneous, grade: 1, Durham University (Durham Business School), course: Change Management, language: English, abstract: This paper is about the resistance to change in organisations and what leaders can do to reduce resistance to change. Change management is a process of renewing organisations in terms of their structure, direction or capability. Organisational change is almost impossible to avoid. In today's economic climate, which is characterised by profit orientation, competition, and technological progress, change is necessary to gain market shares or maintain a leading market position. Beer and Nohria (2000) put this in radical terms by claiming that most traditional companies have accepted that they have to change or die. Implementing change within large organisations can be challenging, however. The analysis of Kotter (2012) is as follows: "In many situations the improvements have been disappointing and the carnage has been appalling, with wasted resources and burned-out, scared or frustrated employees." Whilst this may sound extreme, Kotter has a point given the fact that 70% of all changes fail. However, this paper will describe methods of reducing resistance to change and use the example of a case study to illustrate the answer.