Question

According to Shaul Oreg (2003; 2006), what are the factors that have a positive influence on the dispositions toward change in an organization?

Answer 1

In today's workforce, organizational change is becoming ever more normal. But an growing body of work indicates that attempts towards reform frequently stall because of opposition from workers. New work reveals that tolerance to change differs among populations: certain people are instinctively immune to change, whereas others are sensitive to change. Statistics suggest that the most likely to embrace and endorse reform initiatives were reform-resistant workers while interacting with members who received success incentives. Such results have consequences for researchers, experts and representatives who are seeking to better navigate transition for workers. On the basis of these findings, Oreg argued that aversion to change is a multi-dimensional trait composed of components of behavior, cognitive and affective. He chose top loading objects to quantify certain components and created the Resistance to Change scale, an 18 element instrument composed of four sub-scales: routine search, cerebral rigidity, emotional response to forced transition, and short-term concentration. As these four sub-scales were placed into a single second-order element, Oreg also inferred that there is universal resistance to adjustment in an underlying framework and that this framework can be calculated by adding all 18 elements on a scale. Follow-up experiments have verified this instrument's convergent, unequal, concomitant and statistical validity. Overall, Oreg's work adds greatly to the literature, presenting scientific proof that a resistance-to-change propensity occurs and can be assessed. Oreg concludes his thesis by finding out that researchers involved in resistance to change and their relationship with other variables already have a method for calculating the resistance propensity aspect. Knowing how arrangemental variables communicate with leadership styles of managers provides an interesting new path for study into organizational transformation. Dispositionally resistant workers became more responsive to organizational change when they believed their leaders exhibited positive transactional leadership attitudes, particularly contingent leadership incentives.