What Are They Afraid Of?

Employee resistance is all about fear. Culture is the reason initiatives fail.

People both love and hate change, depending on the role they play. In certain circumstances, people gravitate to it, always looking for the next new gadget or fashion trend, for example. Yet in other contexts, especially when change is imposed, our initial reaction is to resist or avoid it.

Consider two examples: It might take a matter of weeks to implement a casual dress day at a company but years to change the operating model. Why is one so easy and the other so hard?

Casual dress days, on the one hand, pose a low social threat. The instructions are clear and there are obvious benefits for employees (comfort, lower cost of clothes, etc.). From a social norms perspective, the risk of compliance is also low — if you don’t wear casual clothing, you can come up with an excuse: you forgot. If you do wear them, you can say you were told to do so. Additionally, you can take your visual cues from others. If they are wearing them, you can still feel like you belong. If they are not, you don’t have to do it either.

Contrast that with changes to an operating model. Consider the case of Ben, an operations manager, who has held a variety of roles in the same department for over 15 years. He started by processing customer information changes and worked his way up to lead teams who performed the same role. Over the years, he built a wealth of knowledge on how the data structures worked and possible workarounds. (We joked that he was the only one who knew where all the bodies were buried.) But when he was moved onto a data and analytics team, his world changed, and, for Ben, everything was threatened.

Using the MAGpie framework, we begin to understand why. His level of mastery declined. He was no longer the go-to subject matter expert on data structures for operations, now that some of his new team members were trained data analysts and data scientists. As such, his knowledge, which gave him a sense of power previously, was now less useful — mainly he was good at explaining the history of why things used to be certain ways. As a result, his level of acceptance declined, forcing him to interact differently with his peers, superiors and lower-level team members. Lastly, because he drew gratification from his ability to provide for his family, his job security and comfort were under threat, as he tried to keep up with more skilled team members. Resistance, as a defense mechanism tied to self-preservation, may have felt, to Ben, like the only way he could respond.  

Resistance to change in the business world is something experts have been studying for over 75 years. Lester Coch and John French published their famous work on participative management, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” in 1948, which starts with the line: “It has always been characteristic of American industry to change products and methods of doing jobs as often as competitive conditions or engineering progress dictates.” Yet what is new is how disciplines outside of managerial science have begun to try and understand resistance.

Evolutionary biologists argue that change and adaptation are a natural part of life. Yet biologists also note that our brains have not evolved as quickly as our environment. As a result, when something is new, it has to be processed by our amygdala to determine whether it is a threat. That is where resistance begins: When people are asked or forced to change and they perceive a threat to their level of comfort or safety, they act in fear.

Neuroscience offers another kind of perspective. On one hand, our brains like patterns because they reduce the amount of energy and effort we have to expend to get things done — what some call the “cognitive load”. Reducing our cognitive load is why, over time, the brain developed “fast thinking” as Daniel Khaneman has argued. The more we can do on autopilot, the more resources are reserved for real problems. Yet others in neuroscience, particularly Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman, have taught us that we process physical and emotional pain in similar places in the brain. Thus, resistance may be less about preserving the energy required in our brains to learn new things and more about the avoidance of pain. How does any of this apply to the workplace? Pain could come from the fears employees have about all kinds of factors — the struggle to learn to master new things, the social rejection we may face from standing out instead of being accepted, or the fear of losing of what gratifies us.

Lastly, we can better understand resistance by turning toward social psychology. Robert Cialdini’s work, in particular, has taught us that social norms and likeability are two of the biggest influences on our behavior. Cass Sunstein published two books this year that further the argument on the role of social influences: “Conformity” and “How Change Happens.” What these and other scientists have found is that people resist change because they want to fit in with their peers. They need a sense of belonging first and foremost.

What these disciplines have all found suggests that change may ultimately threaten employees’ sense of well-being: their physiological needs, their sense of safety, their social standing, even their self-esteem. All of these fears compound into resistance.

So what can we do about it?

The best way to minimize resistance is to be an empathetic manager. As I discussed in a recent post, empathetic managers use techniques like active listening to understand their employees’ needs and then match them up with organizational needs, like a puzzle. The MAGpie framework enables managers to assess whether resistance is driven by a lack of understanding of expectations (an issue of mastery), a fear of what that will mean for their sense of belonging and acceptance, or threats to their sense of gratification. As with Ben, it may be a case of all three.  

Empathetic managers also have unconditional positive regard for their colleagues. As a result, they can more easily uncover employees’ fears, address them, and allow everyone’s voices to be heard. From there, teams can start to chip away at concerns and challenges until employees are more comfortable. That then allows them to accept the change and work toward it, instead of resisting it.

These steps build trust within teams and across organizations. That trust is beneficial not only for getting the work done but also for re-establishing employees’ sense of safety and eliminating their fears. We even see the impacts on our bodies. When we feel like we belong and trust the people around us, our brains release oxytocin. That makes us feel good. When we feel heard, understood, and part of something — further helping to reduce our fears — our bodies release GABA, which calms us down. Dopamine is released when we realize that we are progressing well while trying to change, encouraging us to continue on that path.

Perhaps then the message to managers is this: Your teams are not resistant, they are afraid. Let’s make them comfortable and help them understand they have a better place in the new world. With patience, compassion, and support, most of their resistance will subside.