Understanding and Coping With Change Essay

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Coping with Change

In many cases, change is a daunting prospect. Although the world effectively exists in a continuous state of change, alterations to people's daily lives -- particularly as related to their families or to their workplace environments -- can frequently generate resistance from the individuals most affected. Still, there are other times in which change is desired and readily embraced. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze a host of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors that are responsible for producing resistance to change in people, in order to better understand this phenomenon and to ultimately cope with it.

External resistance to change stems from a number of factors, particularly in an organization or workplace environment. One of the most readily identifiable of these is lack of trust in management (Pasubathy, 2010, p. ). Quite simply, there are numerous situations in which people are not consulted about change, and it is suddenly sprang on them. When these people do not trust the underlying reasons that management has effected such a change, they tend to be more resistant to it. Another external factor relates to communication regarding change. If such communication is not sufficient -- if people do not get sufficient notice or the reasons for change and their impact upon people are not relayed lucidly -- individuals are more likely to resist it.

Internal factors for change largely involve psychological reasons. These reasons include emotional factors such as aggression and frustration -- whether directly related to the workplace, its change, or not -- (Bolognese, 2002). Also, employee perception of the reasons for change are considered internal factors that can engender resistance to change. Any sense of ambiguity related to change in the workplace, in which there are aspects of it that are not perfectly clear to employees, can produce resistance to change. Additionally, if change involves personal aspects of an employee's life, it is likely to produce an internal reason for resistance.

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There is an example from my past that helps to provide a case study regarding resistance to change as it explicitly related to a lack of understanding. Very early on in his undergraduate career, my friend had obtained a job at the audio visual department of the school of the arts. The term cushy did not begin to describe this job. So long as the various audio visual technicians would attend to the various classrooms and events in which they had to set up equipment, and come to pick it up promptly before any thievery of it could take place, the employees had almost total autonomy. They could relax in the audio visual department, do homework, watch movies, surf the internet, or do anything else that they saw fit. In many instances they could go out to eat or engage in other activities (so long as there was at least a couple of people there to answer the phones to offer customer service). Oftentimes, set-ups would simply involve flipping a particular switch or simply turning a knob or two on the audio visual equipment already located in classrooms. Moreover, to underscore the laidback environment, it was supervised by an immigrant musician who wore very attractive clothing, which she insisted was standard professional attire in her native Spain.

One day after spring break, my friend told me he had returned to work and saw that everything was different. All of the equipment had bee recently inventoried and was positioned in different places. His supervisor was now wearing standard professional attire for the United States and was dressed like any common varieties of 'suits' which populated the nearby business school. He found that his schedule had changed, and that indeed the very hours for scheduling themselves had changed as well. The entire environment and company culture -- which was previously relaxed and carefree, had now become….....

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