Overcoming Resistance to Change and Enhancing Creative Performance

Abstract

Drawing on the sense-making perspective, the authors develop and test a cross-level model of individual creativity, integrating resistance to change and three human resource contextual factors to moderate the individual relationship. This cross-level study of working adults from a wide array of Chinese companies addresses one of the major challenges managers face in enhancing individual-level creativity: overcoming employees' resistance to change. The authors study the efficacy of three contextual factors that are important elements of the creative processmodernity climate, leadership style, and coworker characteristics-for helping managers overcome this challenge. The authors find that the three contextual variables moderate the negative relationship between resistance to change and creativity, and the pattern of results indicates that managing human resources practices may mitigate the detrimental effects of resistance to change on creativity.

Reducing the harmful effect of work overload on creative behaviour: Buffering roles of energy‐enhancing resources

“…Such behaviours generate new ideas that can improve the current organizational situation (Shalley & Gilson, 2004;Son, Cho, & Kang, 2017;Zhou & George, 2001) and offer powerful benefits, such as when they add to the organization's learning capacity (Oltra & Vivas-López, 2013) or the implementation of positive change (Maimone & Sinclair, 2014). Despite these beneficial effects, generating new ideas that improve the status quo can be challenging too, because other organizational members may consider the activities disruptive or threatening to their existing power bases (Hon, Bloom, & Crant, 2014;Zhou & George, 2001). For example, when creative employees suggest novel solutions to problems, other organizational members may resist to the extent that they feel threatened by the changes associated with those solutions (Yuan & Woodman, 2010).…”

Creating Positive Employee Change Evaluation: The Role of Different Levels of Organizational Support and Change Participation

“…When change occurs, employees are often asked to learn new skills and adapt their working style to fit the new status quo. One's co-workers may well be a very helpful source of such support, and can help with acquiring new skills and knowledge (Hon et al, 2011;Hargadon and Bechky, 2006). Co-workers can also emotionally support each other in times of uncertainty often caused by organizational change initiatives.…”

The Impact of Employee Empowerment on the Success of Organizational Change: A Study in Privatized Enterprises in Jordan

“…Hon, et al, (2011) emphasize that "anyone who creates a new idea to change should have the right to hold open discussions with others". This study also showed the importance of creativity and interest in new ideas that related about how to readiness to change and minimizing the resistance which inversely related to creativity and improving the performance of organizational employees.…”