Organizing for America | Carol McLain's Blog: The Politics of (Resistance to) Change

The Politics of (Resistance to) Change

By Carol 4Obama4America - Mar 27th, 2008 at 12:59 am EDT

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Tags: change, politics

I have been wanting to start my own blog since last summer, but my priority has been trying to finish a master's degree in Organizational Leadership. In fact, my comprehensive exams are this Saturday; however, in my preparation, I ran across a passage on organizational change in one of my texts that is so applicable to what we're seeing in the elections right now, I felt it was a good time to jump in. To be honest, I was looking for a good reason to come to the site tonight (I'm having a hard time staying away), and by God's grace, I found one!

It doesn't take dramatic change to see resistance, but in the case of this upcoming election, dramatic change is exactly what we need. What follows is an excerpt from Organizational Behavior (Robbins, & Judge, 2007). You can substitute "government" everywhere you see "organization" to get my point on how it relates.

"No discussion of resistance to change would be complete without a brief mention of the politics of change. Because change inevitably threatens the status quo, it inherently implies political activity.

"Internal change agents typically are individuals high in the organization who have a lot to lose from change. They have, in fact, risen to their positions of authority by developing skills and behavioral patterns that are favored by the organization. Change is a threat to those skills and patterns. What if they are no longer the ones the organization values? Change creates the potential for others in the organization to gain power at their expense. "Politics suggests that the impetus for change is more likely to come from outside change agents, who are new to the organization (and have less invested in the status quo), or from managers slightly removed from the main power structure. Managers who have spent their entire careers with a single organization and eventually achieve a senior position in the hierarchy are often major impediments to change. Change is a very real threat to their status and position. Yet they may be expected to implement changes to demonstrate they’re not merely caretakers. By acting as change agents, they can symbolically convey to various constituencies—stockholders, suppliers, employees, customers—that they are on top of problems and adapting to a dynamic environment. When forced to introduce change, these long-time power holders tend to implement incremental changes. Radical change is too threatening.

"Power struggles within the organization will determine, to a large degree, the speed and quantity of change. We can expect that long-time career executives will be sources of resistance. This explains why boards of directors that recognize the imperative for the rapid introduction of radical change in their organizations frequently turn to outside candidates for new leadership.

OK, we could also relate "boards of directors" to our superdelegates, and of course, we--the people--are like the "stockholders" mentioned above. I'll let you make the other correlations.

Now I'm back to the books!

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