Organizational Change and Resistence to Change Within Companies

Abstract

If the general concept of change is only "a new state of affairs different from the old state of things", it is more difficult to define organizational change. The name of organizational change makes it obvious that it is a change in organizational activities, but this statement does not say too much about the type of activities that are subject to change. Making a comparison between operational and organizational change, we will see that the first refers exclusively to individuals, with their roles and values, while the second covers a much broader field, namely all operational processesthose of service delivery, customer service, production and logistics. Besides these, organizational change also covers changes that occur in work processes (which can be understood as "a set of work tasks to achieve a clear goal" [1]) and their subsystems. Organizational change can be also defined as "a transitional state between the present state and a future state to which the organization tends" [2]. Another relevant factor in defining change is represented by the causes that determine the apparition of change, which mainly characterizes the radical and paradigmatic change named "second order change" by Levy [17].