Understanding Resistance to Large-scale Organisational Change

Abstract

This thesis explores organisational change from an organisational-driven and individual-response perspective to understand and recommend how employees, leaders, scholars and organisations must adapt to achieve transformation outcomes.

Firstly, from an organisational-driven viewpoint, this research investigates the relatively unexplored intersection of decentralisation, organisational change and employee resistance. Conducted within a multinational organisation undergoing substantial transformational change, a longitudinal study collected data pre- and post-critical programme implementation (June 2022 and June 2023). The primary hypothesis posited that decentralisation would positively correlate with reduced resistance to change post-implementation. This aspect of this research also scrutinised national and regional cultural dimensions, based on Hofstede, and contextual factors as moderators: individualism, power distance, and the number of external agile experts. The thesis findings offer crucial insights for organisations to understand how to manage resistance to large-scale change from an organisational-driven viewpoint.

Secondly, from an individual-response perspective, existing research lacks insights into how employees cope with change-related anxiety or fear during organisational change. The researcher proposes and tests a model that examines how employees react to change-related anxiety or change-related fear by engaging in gossip behaviour. This gossip behaviour, in turn, influences resistance to change. Through a critical incident study within the same multinational organisation undergoing significant change, the researcher collected data on a wide range of gossip incidents and argues that gossip operates as a reaction to change-related anxiety or fear and, in turn, influences resistance to change. The relationship between gossip and resistance to change will depend on the gossiper’s gender, with female participants resisting change more after gossiping. The findings contribute valuable insights for practical applications and further research on workplace gossip amid organisational change.