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Lew Perren: Principal Lecturer, Centre for Management Development, University of Brighton, UK
Introduction
This paper originates in a session on "How resistance to change by middle-managers[1] can be a positive force" at the open space conference on "The Future of Management Development". (The Editorial for this issue examines the process of organizing and running an open space conference.) The session started with the proposition that most of the literature associated with organizational change took the perspective that any form of resistance to change was an annoying barrier which needed to be overcome. This certainly appears to be the case with the numerous texts which specifically address change management[2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and texts which focus on the allied areas of total quality management[8, 9, 10] and business process re-engineering[11, 12, 13]. Such texts seem to view resistance as a deviant behaviour that needs to be understood and cured[14, 15, 16]. At the heart of their argument is a unitarist perspective which views conflict as unnecessary and a waste of valuable resource. It assumes there are no real reasons for significant differences in aims or values, as all employees have chosen to be part of the organization and their interests and those of the organization are the same[17]. This perspective is supported by the American culture "gurus" who viewed strong, single purpose, unitarist corporate cultures as the way for corporations to achieve competitive advantage (see for example Peters and Waterman[18] and Deal and Kennedy[19]).
The industrial relations literature offers a handful of different perspectives (Palmer[17] suggests there are five main perspectives: unitary, liberal-collectivist, corporatist, liberal-individualist and Marxist), but concentrates mainly on the relationship between "management" and "workers" or coalitions of "workers". Less is said about the relationship between middle managers and their more senior colleagues[20, 21, 22]. This literature extends the frame of reference for resistance to change from a purely unitarist perspective, to offer other more plural interpretations. However, as the change management texts referenced above demonstrate, the non-unitarist perspectives receive less favour in many of the practical texts aimed at managers[23, 24].
We suggest that the prevailing view of resistance to change might be wrong and that far from being a hindrance it could actually be a benefit to an organization. At...