Understanding Resistance to Change – Building on Coch and French

Bernard Burnes

148 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Change Management

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Organizational Change and Leadership Management and Organizational Studies Organizational Management and Change

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the nature of resistance to change (RTC) and the notion that employees are the prime source of such resistance. It takes a historical perspective on the subject, beginning with an examination of Coch and French's [1948. Overcoming resistance to change. Human Relations, 1, 512–532] influential work on resistance, especially their assertion that resistance does not arise from the individual, but from the context in which the change takes place. The article explains that their work was part of a long-running series of studies of change by Kurt Lewin. This leads on to a review of the development of the resistance literature since their article was published. This is followed by an examination of four theories of resistance, which shows that they are consistent with and help develop Coch and French's work. The article concludes by arguing that taking a ‘long view’ enables us to see why their work provided not only the foundations for our understanding of RTC, but also how it can be built on to produce a rounded and robust view of RTC.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 148 citations exist upstream.

References

1957A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance 1991The fifth discipline, the art and practice of the learning organization 2017A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance 1981The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice 2001Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research.2009Leading change: why transformation efforts fail 1983In search of excellence: Lessons from America's best- run companies 1987Science in Action

Cited by

2022Revisiting resistance to change and how to manage it: What has been learned and what organizations need to do 2021Digital Transformation of Learning Organizations 2016What’s in it for others? The relationship between prosocial motivation and commitment to change among youth care professionals 2016Reimagining organisational change leadership 2017Resistance to Change and Performance: Toward a More Even-Handed View of Dispositional Resistance 2019

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.