Using the future time perspective to analyse resistance to, and readiness for, change
| Published date | 06 January 2020 |
| Pages | 262-279 |
| Date | 06 January 2020 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-04-2018-0113 |
| Author | Konstantin Bagrationi,Thomas Thurner |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
Using the future time perspective
to analyse resistance to, and
readiness for, change
Konstantin Bagrationi and Thomas Thurner
National Research University Higher School of Economics,
Moscow, Russian Federation
Abstract
Purpose –When a major Russian energy provider introduced a new technology that required organisational
adjustment, the company’s management was surprised by the degree of internal resistance these changes
provoked. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors took reference to the work on readiness to change and
studied how the future time perspective, which connects with early writings by Lewin (1942), would explain
the attitudes and behaviour of 148 managers.
Findings –The findings indicate that only a small number of employees perceived the future as offering
many opportunities and showed willingness to pursue them. The majority of employees are either fearful of
future changes, or do not have a strong sense of belonging to the company and hence are disinterested in
prospective opportunities within the firm.
Originality/value –The different constructs of the future introduce an emic perspective to the study of
organisational change and answer calls to enrich the measurements that are currently in use.
Keywords Russia, Innovation, Organizational change, Digitalization, Employee resistance,
Energy provider
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The provision of energy ranks among the most vital public services for both citizens and the
local economy. Energy providers, traditionally among the largest organisations of regional
administration, produce and/or collect and distribute energy to their customers. With energy
production and consumption changing rapidly, energy providers have turned into gatekeepers
for emerging key technologies, from alternative energy production methods to smart grid
solutions (e.g. Soltero et al., 2018). When a major Russian energy provider introduced a new
technology that required organisational adjustment, the company’s management was
surprised by the degree of employee resistance which these changes provoked. The situation
became unmanageable, and external support was required to continue the provision of
services. The authors of this paper were invited to review and accompany the processes of
change and were asked to study the roots of the resistance. The paper is based on these
activities and providesinsights into twocore questions regarding innovation managementand
organisational development: why should a firm expect employee resistance and what can be
done to ease the situation (Coch and French, 1948; Ford et al., 2008; Jones and Van de Ven, 2016;
Cinite and Duxbury, 2018).
Instances of employee resistancearemorefrequentthancommonly perceived (e.g. Maurer,
1996; Waddell and Sohal, 1998; Pardo del Val and Martínez Fuentes, 2003; Oreg, 2006; Erwin
and Garman, 2010; Rafferty et al., 2013)[1]. Resistance to change is defined by Peiperl (2005,
p. 348) as “[…] active or passive responses on the part of a person or group that militate against
a particular change, a program of changes, or change in general”. Since Coch and French’s (1948)
Employee Relations: The
International Journal
Vol. 42 No. 1, 2020
pp. 262-279
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-04-2018-0113
Received 21 April 2018
Revised 26 August 2018
7 November 2018
15 December 2018
3 April 2019
25 June 2019
30 July 2019
Accepted 31 July 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
The paper was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research
University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported within the framework of a subsidy by the
Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100”.
262
ER
42,1
work with regard to “overcoming resistance to change”, which built on experiments by
Kurt Lewin in the 1930s and 1940s (Marrow, 1969; Burnes, 2007), various avenues have been
taken to understand more fully this phenomenon. After decades of research, many questions
concerning the reasons why change fails still require answers (Buchanan et al., 2005). Evidence
suggests that psychological values are noteworthy (e.g. Erwin and Garman, 2010; Hon et al.,
2014), and that future studies of individuals and their interplay with organisational
characteristics look promising (Dent and Goldberg, 1999; Ford and Ford, 2010), especially as
organisational theory increasingly interprets organisations as complex social systems. This
paper follows the concept of change readiness which focuses on beliefs, attitudes and intentions
that employees hold towards organisational change (Armenakis et al., 1993) and sees the
readiness for change as a precondition for successful change processes.
Shedding more light on the attitudes of employees and their readiness to change has now
received a new urgency, as evermore organisations feel the pressure to adopt new
technological developments (Bercovitz and Feldman, 2008). The emergence of new
production technologies, such as 3D-printing and robotics, will disrupt established ways of
production and further replace human labour at the production lines. While the introduction
of such new technologies mostly affects the structure of employment rather than its levels
(e.g. Kapeliushnikov, 2017), fears of a future in which one’s own contribution becomes
redundant have a serious impact on the individual employee. People with a negative
perception of the future will easily feel threatened by any change of the status quo, while
people with a positive view of the future are more likely to embrace the change and find a
new role for themselves in the new setting. The present paper takes up this thought and
asks how employees’different individual constructs of the future are linked to their low
change readiness and negative attitudes towards change in the company being studied.
Consequently, we enrich the concept of change readiness by introducing the notion of a
future time perspective (FTP) which has been used since the mid-1980s for studying
individual or group behaviour in organisations (e.g. Baltes et al., 2014).
Most research on the subject matter has used a top-down perspective on both employee
attitudes and behaviour. In contrast, we take an emic approach and focus our analysis on
individual narratives and how thesenarratives explainattitudes and rulesof behaviours (for a
study on the dominance of the etic view as opposed to the emic view on studies of resistance to
change, see Cinite and Duxbury, 2018). Therefore, our presented method fills a long-standing
gap as more employee-focussed insights are in great demand by change agents who look for
information on potential difficulties throughout the change process ( Bouckenooghe et al., 2015).
Russia provides a veryinteresting setting for such a study. Academic literaturedescribes
the present management style in Russiaas strong and authoritative(especially Kets de Vries,
2001), with top-down communication and high-power distance, while at the same time
protective and paternalistic towards subordinates (Kets de Vries, 2000; Javidan and House,
2001; Grachev and Bobina, 2006; Thurner and Gershman, 2014). Such a style may result in
abusive and exploitative behaviour (Luthans et al., 1998; Puffer and McCar thy, 2001). This
systemic deficiency has also beenconfirmed by Dixon and Day in their research into the case
of the Russian oil giantYukos. Despite their claims of opennessand other western values, the
top management consisted of a small group of people who made decisions. The rest of
the staff feltleft out and, therefore, easilyreplaceable (Dixon and Day, 2010).The environment
in which change happens certainly plays a role, and Russia constitutes a particularly
interesting case as few societies have undergone comparable deep-going and rapid changes
(Gershman and Thurner, 2016; Thurner and Roud, 2016).
Conceptual framework
The history of studying attitudes towards organisational change and change readiness
dates back to Coch and French’s (1948) seminal work which built on long-running studies of
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Future time
perspective
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