The significance of these research findings, from management’s point of view, is that executives and staff experts need not expertness in using the devices of participation but a real understanding, in depth and detail, of the specific social arrangements that will be sustained or threatened by the change or by the way in which it is introduced.
These observations check with everyday management experience in industry. When we stop to think about it, we know that many changes occur in our factories without a bit of resistance. We know that people who are working closely with one another continually swap ideas about short cuts and minor changes in procedure that are adopted so easily and naturally that we seldom notice them or even think of them as change. The point is that because these people work so closely with one another, they intuitively understand and take account of the existing social arrangements for work and so feel no threat to themselves in such everyday changes.
By contrast, management actions leading to what we commonly label “change” are usually initiated outside the small work group by staff people. These are the changes that we notice and the ones that most frequently bring on symptoms of resistance. By the very nature of their work, most of our staff specialists in industry do not have the intimate contact with operating groups that allows them to acquire an intuitive understanding of the complex social arrangements which their ideas may affect. Neither do our staff specialists always have the day-to-day dealings with operating people that lead them to develop a natural respect for the knowledge and skill of these people. As a result, all too often the men behave in a way that threatens and disrupts the established social relationships. And the tragedy is that so many of these upsets are inadvertent and unnecessary.
Yet industry must have its specialists—not only many kinds of engineering specialists (product, process, maintenance, quality, and safety engineers) but also cost accountants, production schedulers, purchasing agents, and personnel people. Must top management therefore reconcile itself to continual resistance to change, or can it take constructive action to meet the problem?
I believe that our research in various factory situations indicates why resistance to change occurs and what management can do about it. Let us take the “why” factors first.
Self-preoccupation:
All too frequently we see staff specialists who bring to their work certain blind spots that get them into trouble when they initiate change with operating people. One such blind spot is “self-preoccupation.” The staff specialists get so engrossed in the technology of the change they are interested in promoting that they become wholly oblivious to different kinds of things that may be bothering people. Here are two examples:
- In one situation the staff people introduced, with the best of intentions, a technological change which inadvertently deprived a number of skilled operators of much of the satisfaction that they were finding in their work. Among other things, the change meant that, whereas formerly the operators’ outputs had been placed beside their work positions where they could be viewed and appreciated by everyone, they were now being carried away immediately from their work positions. The workers did not like this.
The sad part of it was that there was no compelling cost or technical reason why the output could not be placed beside the work position as it had been formerly. But the staff people who had introduced the change were so literal-minded about their ideas that when they heard complaints on the changes from the operators, they could not comprehend what the trouble was. Instead, they began repeating all the logical arguments why the change made sense from a cost standpoint. The final result here was a chronic restriction of output and persistent hostility on the part of the operators.
- An industrial engineer undertook to introduce some methods changes in one department with the notion firmly in mind that this assignment presented her with an opportunity to “prove” to higher management the value of her function. She became so preoccupied with her personal desire to make a name for her particular techniques that she failed to pay any attention to some fairly obvious and practical considerations which the operating people were calling to her attention but which did not show up in her time-study techniques. As could be expected, resistance quickly developed to all her ideas, and the only “name” that she finally won for her techniques was a black one.
Obviously, in both of these situations the staff specialists involved did not take into account the social aspects of the change they were introducing. For different reasons they got so preoccupied with the technical aspects of the change that they literally could not see or understand what all the fuss was about.
We may sometimes wish that the validity of the technical aspect of the change were the sole determinant of its acceptability. But the fact remains that the social aspect is what determines the presence or absence of resistance. Just as ignoring this fact is the sure way to trouble, so taking advantage of it can lead to positive results. We must not forget that these same social arrangements which at times seem so bothersome are essential for the performance of work. Without a network of established social relationships a factor would be populated with a collection of people who had no idea of how to work with one another in an organized fashion. By working with this network instead of against it, management’s staff representatives can give new technological ideas a better chance of acceptance.