Understanding and Coping with Change

Although change has become commonplace in modern organizations, the reported failure rates of change implementation range from 40% to as high as 70% (McKay et al., 2013). Considering our global economy and technological innovation, this rate is alarmingly high. It is no surprise that these statistics have prompted researchers to investigate the causes underlying change failure in modern organizational settings (McKay et al., 2013). Employee resistance has been identified as a primary source of change implementation failure across a range of organizations and industries worldwide (McKay et al., 2013). Change is a situation that interrupts normal patterns of organization and calls for participants to enact new patterns, involving interplay of deliberate and emergent processes that can be highly ambiguous for everyone involved (Ford et al., 2008). Employees resist change for a variety of more or less logical reasons (Baack, 2012). These reasons will be explored to understand the external and internal factors of change within organizations. In addition, a scenario will be presented to analyze how change was introduced, perceived, and implemented at a real life organization. Change is never an easy task for change enactors or recipients. As human beings, we are naturally hesitant to embrace change (Baack, 2012). However, change is sometimes necessary for organizations to keep up in this ever changing and challenging global economy. It can mean the difference between success and failure for organizations. There are both internal and external factors impacting employees' perception of organizational change. In addition, it may vary greatly from employee to employee, so what's impacting an individual's perception of the change can have opposite reactions on others. Internal changes, or internal driving forces, are the type of changes that occur within a company. External changes, or external driving forces, are changes that occur with no say from the company, such as