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HBR Research: To Get People to Embrace Change, Emphasize What Will Stay the Same

HBR

Research: To Get People to Embrace Change, Emphasize What Will Stay the Same

https://hbr.org/2018/08/research-to-get-people-to-embrace-change-emphasize-what-will-stay-the-same

“Common wisdom in management science and practice has it that to build support for a change project, visionary leadership is needed to outline what is wrong with the current situation. By explaining how the envisioned change will result in a better and more appealing future, leaders can overcome resistance to change. But our research, recently published in the Academy of Management Journal, leads us to add a very important caveat to this.

A root cause of resistance to change is that employees identify with and care for their organizations. People fear that after the change, the organization will no longer be the organization they value and identify with — and the higher the uncertainty surrounding the change, the more they anticipate such threats to the organizational identity they hold dear. Change leadership that emphasizes what is good about the envisioned change and bad about the current state of affairs typically fuels these fears because it signals that changes will be fundamental and far-reaching.

Counterintuitively, then, effective change leadership has to emphasize continuity — how what is central to “who we are” as an organization will be preserved, despite the uncertainty and changes on the horizon.”

Read more: https://hbr.org/2018/08/research-to-get-people-to-embrace-change-emphasize-what-will-stay-the-same

Stephen

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Posted on: August 23, 2018, 6:31 am Category: Uncategorized

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