Managerial Practices as Antecedents of Employees' Resistance to Change: Organizational Change and Human Resource Management

2. The Three Components Of Resistance To Change

Following Hornung and Rousseau (2007), we understand change as structure-based transformations in the organization. This is the reengineering of production and administrative processes, the restructuring of the employee participation systems or the restructuring of production processes involving international outsourcing and foreign market expansion where the employees must learn new ways of thinking, acting and/or operating in order to achieve the defined objectives of the change program (Avey et al., 2008; Schalk, Campbell & Freese, 1998). The main idea underlying this approach is that member’s behavior is at the core of organizational change because organizations only change through their employees (Choi and Ruona, 2011) who determine the ultimate success of such changes (Fugate et al., 2012). In this context, resistance to change must be understood as a reaction against that change. Resistant-to-change employees adopt dysfunctional attitudes (Avey et al., 2008) in order to obstruct or completely stop the changes (Oreg, 2006).