Strategic Innovation in Microfirms to Overcome Resistance to Change

Abstract

For a variety of reasons, strategic innovation in a microfirm's business model can be particularly challenging. One French company that specializes in the distribution of legal announcements and local economic news managed to use IT to not only reinvent its business model but also transform the rules of competition in its sector. Its experiences highlight the particular difficulties that small firms encounter when introducing new technology and the importance of training and creative alliances to ease both internal and external resistance to change. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Resistance to change in the financial management of small family-owned firms: a grounded theory of family firms in Laos

“…The current research contributes to bridge the gap regarding resistance to change in the financial management of family firms (Dent and Goldberg, 1999; Broadbent et al , 2001; Frankfurter and McGoun, 2002; Howcroft, 2006; Fritsch and Kublina, 2019). While most of the existing literature focusses on organizational change (Macrì et al , 2002), resistance to change in leadership (Kan and Parry, 2004) and strategic innovation (Bourdon and Jaouen, 2016), it has not been addressed in family firm research (Erwin and Garman, 2010; Pereira et al , 2019). Such studies indicate that organizations are dealing with change, but they have not produced a grounded concept for the rational drivers of resistance to change in family firms.…”

“…In one relatively early study, Handler and Kram (1988) and Gray (2002) conceptualized that resistance to change was linked to firms’ behavioural, cognitive and affective resistance. Existing theories of resistance to change make different assumptions with regard to their preference between change-driving and change-resisting forces in financial management (Erwin and Garman, 2010; Bourdon and Jaouen, 2016; Amarantou et al , 2018). Previous literature reviews demonstrated resistance to change primarily from a managerial viewpoint, in seeing potentially useful rational drivers of change rather than change-resisting forces at a family firm level (Kan and Parry, 2004; Howcroft, 2006; Oreg, 2018).…”

“…This research has explored change in financial management practices using existing grounded data. Most of the existing research on family firms has tested the relationship among variables, which relates to resistance to change (Bourdon and Jaouen, 2016; Shimoni, 2017; Rafferty and Jimmieson, 2017; Kholeif and Jack, 2019), but there seems to be an unclear consensus on the grounded data which has emerged, to create a link between research and practice (Erwin and Garman, 2010).…”

“…However, other researchers have demonstrated that family firms often find these changes unwanted and radical (Broadbent et al , 2001; Gross and Geiger, 2017). Bourdon and Jaouen (2016), Oreg (2018), Baker et al (2019) and Jain et al (2019) highlight that the potential of resistance to change should reduce in confidence biases to a more compressive in working capital management. This research focusses on resistance to change in the financial management of Laotian family firms.…”

Systematic literature review on technological transformation in SMEs: a transformation encompassing technology assimilation and business model innovation

“…SMEs' employees may also resist changes imposed by new technology due to a lack of specific technical knowledge, difficulty adapting, fear of job loss, or loss of recognition/responsibilities (Birkel et al 2019). According to Bourdon and Jaouen (2016), changing employees' resistance can be easily managed in large companies, but in SMEs, there is a magnification effect; the relative impact of an individual is multiplied (one employee out of ten means that 10% of workforce resists change). The employees may also not be committed to change due to additional workloads required, as reported by one of the case studies of Teoh et al (2022) of an SME that adopted digital BMI.…”