Still challenging “resistance to change” Open Access

The search was conducted using a database-driven approach with journal quality criteria as described by Hiebl (2023). Our search included the following databases: ABI-Inform Collection, Academic Search Complete (Ebsco), EBSCOhost (All Ebsco databases) and Business Source Ultimate. Within a taxonomy of reviews, “Narrative reviews serve an important function in taking stock of the state of research […] and then suggesting ways in which that community can improve” (Cronin & George, 2023, p. 174). Our primary search term [see Snyder’s (2019) suggestion on tailoring search terms to match the specificity of the research question] was resistance to change, as that was the focus of our review. Because the critique of the RtoC term originated in 1999, the time period was restricted accordingly (1999–2024). The initial search resulted in over 88,000 hits. Following prior reviews (e.g. Chandranathan, 2025) the list was narrowed using the Australian Business Dean’s Council list as the journal quality criteria. This procedure led to the identification of 367 articles that could potentially contain information about organizational RtoC relevant to this study. Given our focus on ascertaining a possible empirical pivot, the list was further narrowed to empirical studies, referencing only theoretical articles when they were cited repeatedly by empirical studies. Ultimately, 56 articles were identified.

We analyze the results of our literature review using a Force-Field analysis. Derived from Lewin’s foundational theory of change, force-field analysis involves comparing helping forces, or forces for a change, to hindering forces or forces against a change (Burnes & Cooke, 2013). According to force-field analysis, change occurs when the sum of helping forces exceeds the sum of hindering forces. Figure 1 contains a force-field analysis that depicts the conventional view of RtoC, as described by Dent & Goldberg (1999). In particular, the conventional view presumes two broad categories of forces:

1. recipient’s RtoC as the predominant, taken-for-granted and automatic hindering force; and

2. organizations’ attempts to “overcome” RtoC through various helping forces.

Thus, the conventional view suggests that a change occurs (i.e. is successful) when organizations overcome employees’ RtoC. As we analyzed these 56 articles, we discovered that the majority fit the formula described above, yet some did not, suggesting that Figure 1 is overly simplistic. Those that did not fit led us to offer Figure 2, an expanded, multilevel view of “reactions to change.” Figure 2 acknowledges that hindering and helping forces can stem from individuals/teams, organizations and/or the environment. Reviews of mature research fields are ripe for such reconceptualizations (Snyder, 2019).

The search term “resistance to change,” selected because of the Dent & Goldberg (1999) conceptual challenge, is used more in micro research. We offer a brief discussion of organizational hindering forces and environmental helping and hindering forces, but a thorough, systematic review, using additional search terms more common at the macro level, is beyond the scope of this paper.

While the conventional view depicts RtoC as a reflexive, almost instinctual employee reaction to change, the literature has now developed a more nuanced view, acknowledging the complexity of the RtoC construct as well as offering innovative views of RtoC at the individual/team level (see Figure 2, superscript label 1).

Researchers have focused on the emotions and cognitions of change recipients that might be the source of resistance, rather than viewing RtoC as an automatic reaction. For example, Amarantou, Kazakopoulou, Chatzoudes, & Chatzoglou (2018) explored the impact of some personality- and job-related characteristics on RtoC in a Greek sample. They measured six independent variables and found the most important were the employee-management relationship and personality traits. Chirico, Salvato, Byrne, Akhter, & Arriaga Múzquiz (2018) identified emotional ownership as one reason for commitment escalation, which results in RtoC in a family business. They identified factors such as ownership identity, long-term orientation, strong family values and a desire to keep the original founder’s business formula unchanged as reasons for escalation commitment. Palma, Klein, & Pedron’s (2023) qualitative study of physicians noted that RtoC (to telemedicine) stems from the feeling of uncertainty. In these studies, the pathway to RtoC is more complex, involving an interplay between cognitions, emotions and other decision-making factors rather than simple automaticity.

In addition, rather than being uniformly true for all employees, research has acknowledged that individuals vary in their propensity to resist change. Oreg & Sverdlik (2018) focused on dispositional resistance, an individual’s personality-based inclination to resist change. Dispositionally resistant individuals predominantly exhibit negative reactions when change is imposed. Oreg & Sverdlik (2018) reported that dispositionally resistant individuals outperformed nonresistant individuals on routine tasks. However, resistant individuals perform more poorly on nonroutine tasks. Relatedly, Masry-Herzalah & Dor-Haim (2022) found that those individuals who were more dispositionally resistant to change did not leverage their technological efficacy as much to teach successfully online during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a German automotive facility, Turgut, Michel, Rothenhöfer, & Sonntag (2016) noted that dispositional RtoC positively affects emotional exhaustion. More recently, dispositional RtoC exists at the team-level, predicting RtoC above and beyond individual dispositional RtoC (Sverdlik & Oreg, 2023).

Other researchers have similarly examined the impact of additional individual differences, such as one’s self-efficacy for change (Cho, Kim, & Choi, 2021) and more specific forms of self-efficacy, such as self-efficacy regarding the use of a specific technology that was the subject of the change (Hampel, Sassenberg, Scholl, & Ditrich, 2024) and age/generation (Jonbekova, Kim, Kerimkulova, Ruby, & Sparks, 2021), on RtoC. Highlighting an unexpected finding, Hampel, Sassenberg, Scholl, & Reichenbach (2022) found that the age of blue-collar workers positively predicted their RtoC.

An important development in the RtoC literature has been the recognition that RtoC itself is not the only individual-level hindering force, but rather, one of many possible individual responses to change. One of the most prominent examples of this notion is Oreg et al.’s (2011) tripartite model of explicit reactions to change, which includes affective, cognitive and behavioral reactions as broad categories that capture various direct reactions to change. Moreover, this model also describes change consequences, which are more indirect, long-term outcomes of change. Szabla’s (2007) work incorporated this view of RtoC and inspected the relationship between individuals’ perceptions of leadership strategy and those individuals’ cognitive, emotional and intentional responses to planned change. Szabla found that individuals have widely divergent perceptions of change leaders’ intentions related to the planned change and those differences affected individuals’ cognitive, emotional and intentional responses to change. When asked about the leader’s strategy, only about seven percent saw it as normative-reductive. The remaining respondents were about evenly split between rational-empirical and power-coercive. Power-coercive strategies did not elicit positive cognitive, emotional or intentional responses to the intended changes. Reinhold, Schnugg, & Barthold (2018) inspected how arrest (work slowdown) and flow (work progress) can be forms of gestures that communicate employees’ perceptions of organizational change. In this sense, workspaces are viewed as stages for unexpected gestures to occur.

Viewing RtoC positively, Jacobs & Keegan (2018) studied whether change reactions might not only be based on self-interest but also on concern for others and/or the organization. Change recipients make sense of the change based on ethical considerations of the effect on themselves, but to an even greater extent, the impact of the change on others. Likewise, Ford & Ford (2009) and Moutousi & May (2018) discussed the possibility that RtoC can be positive, especially when employees perceive that unethical practices may be involved. These researchers surfaced ways in which unethical leadership impacts individuals’ RtoC. Specifically, the effects of an individual’s perceptions and rationalizations about the potential ramifications of their personal involvement in unethical practices are based on whether leadership’s expectations are fair. Ford and Ford realized that when employees perceive that change is being handled by leadership in an unethical manner, employee RtoC can make a positive correction to the unethical practices, protecting the ethical integrity of the organization and preventing potentially detrimental change results. As noted by Schweiger, Stouten, & Bleijenbergh (2018), the “modern paradigm” (p. 658) is seeing RtoC as a valuable source.

Research after Dent & Goldberg’s (1999) critique has followed in their footsteps by identifying the possibility that individuals might actually embrace change and exhibit helping forces (Figure 2, superscript label 2). As previously mentioned, Dent & Powley (2002) provided empirical support for the possibility that individuals accept (rather than resist) change. Similarly, Oreg, Bartunek, Lee, & Do (2018) developed a model to explain four potential behavioral responses to change: change acceptance, change disengagement, change resistance and change proactivity – explicitly recognizing that change acceptance and proactivity are possible. In their model, individual responses to change events are a combination of emotional episodes, which include cognitive appraisal, emotional affect and behavior. Oreg et al. emphasized the importance of appraisal and perception. The model incorporates the effects of appraisal (the degree to which the change event is consistent with the individual’s goals) and valence on the individual’s response to change.

Cinite & Duxbury (2018) explored the relationship between commitment to change and RtoC in Canadian government departments. They learned that the behaviors associated with RtoC are relatively rare. Commitment to change related positively and significantly to voicing concerns, suggesting that employees will not be committed to change or feel encouraged to voice concerns about the change unless the organization is perceived as supportive of the change. Feng, Robin, Fan, & Huang (2020) discovered that, in addition to an organizational commitment to change, there was also a vocational commitment to change. They concluded that employees’ vocational commitment to change was mainly associated with personal vocational development (especially in knowledge workers) and that in these instances their vocational commitment is usually greater than their organizational commitment.

Fugate & Soenen (2018) scrutinized two different forms of employee support for change: compliance and championing. They found that change management support negatively predicts threat appraisals and positively predicts challenge appraisals. Furthermore, challenge appraisals positively predict compliance with the change and championing for change. Threat appraisals, on the other hand, are negatively related to championing for change. Thus, complying with change and championing change seem to be two distinct constructs with different effects. In the context of AI-related changes, Rudko, Bashirpour Bonab, & Bellini (2021) empirically derived “optimists with strongly positive attitudes towards proposed organizational changes, and doubtful optimists with weakly positive attitudes towards proposed organizational changes” (Rudko et al., 2021, p. 2351).

Some research has still framed RtoC as a hindering individual force. Cho et al. (2021) found that perceived ease of use and colleagues’ supportive opinions of the change might help reduce RtoC. In Kim et al.’ (2023) examination of health clinicians’ RtoC to new health information technology, an economics-oriented cost/benefit mindset (when job performance enhancements expected from the technology exceed the costs of switching) were critical to lowering RtoC. Also in health care, Tsai et al. (2023) found that greater knowledge of the technology underlying a change led to lower RtoC. Altogether, the literature seems to have opened to the possibility that individuals might be capable of exerting helping forces through their embrace, or support, of change.

Because there is a body of research on “overcoming” RtoC, stemming from the conventional view that organizations’ primary role is to initiate change and overcome RtoC (Figure 1), several studies appear in the area of “organizational helping forces” (Figure 2, superscript label 3). Notably, the literature has seemed to revolve around more collaborative approaches to reduce RtoC. For example, in China, Zhang, Gao, Zhang, & Lu (2020) examined the effects of authoritarian leadership on RtoC and found that authoritarian leadership is positively related to negative emotions, while negative emotions, in turn, are positively related to RtoC. Along these lines, we detail various organizational helping forces: leadership, feedback, communication, organizational support, trust and change agents.

Henricks, Young, & Kehoe (2020) looked at the effects of transformational leadership on readiness for a specific change (state-readiness) and a generalized RtoC. They found that transformational leadership was positively correlated with readiness for a specific change, but not with generalized RtoC. Jones & Van de Ven (2016) found that both supportive leadership and organizational fairness had a negative relationship with RtoC, which, in turn, had a negative relationship with organizational commitment and perceived organizational effectiveness. Van den Heuvel & Schalk (2009) considered the relationship between perceived psychological contracts and RtoC. The more an employee perceived that the organization had fulfilled its promises, the less the employee resisted change. However, this was only true for affective RtoC. Notably, Van den Heuvel and Schalk pointed out that RtoC, as a natural phenomenon, can be beneficial. Furthermore, resistance does not naturally occur but is a consequence of other problems. Krügel & Traub (2018) studied whether a feeling of reciprocity toward the employer would increase change acceptance and found that change acceptance increased if the employer was able to trigger reciprocal behavior from the employee.

Holten, Hancock, & Bøllingtoft (2019) reported that change leadership and management were positively related to employees’ positive perceptions of change leadership and change management. Private sector employees reported higher degrees of managerial competence, more positive change experiences and more positive change consequences than public sector employees. Rahaman, Camps, Decoster, & Stouten (2021) considered the role of ethical leadership on change commitment and dysfunctional resistance. They discovered that ethical leadership is positively related to change commitment. Furthermore, change commitment lowers employees’ dysfunctional resistance. Organizations can improve the successful implementation of change by focusing on enhancing workplace ethics. Finally, Tangi, Janssen, Benedetti, & Noci (2021) provided an undifferentiated list of “management activities” that might help reduce RtoC.

Schweiger et al. (2018) refer to four advantages of participatory strategies:

1. raise awareness that change is needed;

2. reduce employees’ personal disadvantages;

3. create perceived empowerment; and

4. accumulate trust in change agents.

By viewing change from a systems perspective, they captured the complexities and nonlinearity of organizational change with causal loops. Similarly, Grimolizzi-Jensen (2018) viewed organizational change as a dynamic process. Specifically, they explored the effects of motivational information provided to the employee during the feedback process. As a result of this feedback, the employees become both a cause and an effect as they continuously evaluate the pros and cons of the feedback. The feedback and constant evaluation of the pros and cons of the continuous feedback (cause), and corresponding cognitive and behavioral response (effect), increased the employees’ readiness to change.

Allen, Jimmieson, Bordia, & Irmer (2007) looked at the role that two different sources of communication play on uncertainty: direct supervisors and senior management. They learned that employees are likely to experience uncertainty related to the strategic direction of the organization, the implementation process and specific job-related issues. Direct supervisors were the preferred source of communication for information related to implementation issues and job-related issues. In contrast, senior management was the preferred source of information related to the strategic direction of the organization.

Similarly, Van den Heuvel, Schalk, & Assen (2015) conceptualized communication as the provision of change information wherein an employee perceives that information regarding the change is timely, useful, adequate and satisfactory. The provision of such change information is ultimately beneficial to employees’ affective, behavioral and cognitive attitudes toward the change. Likewise, in a sample of employees from seven companies in Spain, García-Cabrera & Hernández (2014) considered resistant thought, resistant feeling and resistant behavior and discovered that the more information employees received about the change effort, the weaker their resistant thought and resistant feeling.

Caruth & Caruth (2018) identified a number of reasons why change can be problematic. For example, many times companies do a great job preserving the culture, values and customs of the company. Also, when managers are promoted, they want to preserve the policies of the organization that were responsible for getting them promoted, increasing RtoC. So, a clear sense of purpose for the change must be communicated to motivate employees to take the desired actions.

In a sample of public and private sector Portuguese employees, Ferreira, Cardoso, & Braun (2018) revealed that there were significant positive relationships between: developmental rewards and supervisory support with ego-resilience trait and organizational support and behavioral (but not affective) reactions with ego-resilience trait mediating the relationship.

Sahputri, Sujarwoto, & Haryono (2022) found that trust in management predicted lower levels of affective and behavioral RtoC. Similarly, Doeze Jager, Born, & Van Der Molen (2022) found that organizational trust was negatively related to RtoC. Investigating affective and cognitive dimensions of distrust, Peng, Nie, & Cheng (2023) found that both predicted team behavioral RtoC. Oreg & Sverdlik (2011) studied employees’ trust in management and identification with the organization and the relationship between dispositional RtoC and ambivalence. They discovered that for employees high in trust, dispositional resistance positively related to ambivalence (i.e. both strong support and RtoC), while the opposite pattern was true for employees with low trust and identification.

Acting on behalf of organizations, change agents represent possible sources of helping forces for mitigating individual RtoC. Ybema & Horvers (2017) scrutinized how change agents view employees’ RtoC as a mix of open protest to the change with implicit compliance or hidden opposition behind a benign appearance. They found that employees frequently position themselves between acceptance and resistance and either hide or display their dissent. Employees can also adjust their view based on the setting, audience, or situation. Therefore, for change agents, RtoC is not a fixed opposition to be managed with singular effects, but an ongoing negotiation between those for and against the change. Lines, Sullivan, Smithwick, & Mischung (2015) found that change agents played a significant role in minimizing individual RtoC. Their analysis surfaced that organizations that did not formally designate change agents encountered significantly more RtoC than those that did. Furthermore, higher levels of change agent involvement resulted in lower levels of resistance. They also found that smaller and shorter projects faced less resistance. Vos & Rupert (2018) designed a field study on the behavior of a sample of Dutch change agents. They identified three types of change agent behaviors: creating, shaping and framing. They discovered that, for change recipients, all leadership behaviors by the change agent were related to less resistance. Furthermore, they found that agents and recipients view the recipient’s level of resistance differently. In particular, change agents perceive higher levels of recipient resistance than the recipients themselves. Stewart, Astrove, Reeves, Crawford, & Solimeo (2017) inspected the effects of leader status in a team environment. They found that lower-status leaders were more successful in establishing team-based empowerment.

The FFF identifies the possibility that hindering forces can stem from the organization level. Contrary to the conventional view (Figure 1), in some cases, it is the organization (and its leadership), not the change recipients, that are the source of RtoC (Figure 2, superscript label 4). Together with organizational helping forces, organizational hindering forces might be linked to a variety of organizational-level change consequences, such as organizational reputation and prestige, organizational performance and profitability, innovation and organization adaptability. Our search on “resistance to change” revealed no studies that specifically addressed organizational hindering forces. Yet, there is a robust literature on organizational and structural inertia that addresses the same basic phenomenon as RtoC research, but from a yet-to-be-integrated sociological and macro perspective.

The title of the seminal work in the organizational inertia stream, Hannan & Freeman’s (1984) article “Structural Inertia and Organizational Change,” explicitly acknowledges its applicability to organizational change. Within this paradigm, organizations’ pursuit of efficiency results in the development of routines for regular activities and organizational inertia (which describes the difficulty in changing organizations and their structure, in particular) is a natural, and even essential, consequence of these otherwise beneficial routines. A highly cited work in this body of literature, entitled “Overcoming Organizational Inertia to Strengthen Business Model Innovation: An Open Innovation Perspective” (Hao-Chen, Mei-Chi, Lee-Hsuan, & Chien-Tsai, 2013), shares striking similarity with RtoC research on organizational helping forces as a means to “overcome” inertia. This example also illustrates the more macro perspective of this research stream, with a focus on broader organization-wide, multi-faceted changes (e.g. the strategy and entire business model of the organization) and organization-level outcomes (e.g. firm performance). Hannan & Freeman (1984) original work framed organizational inertia as a reaction to higher-level environmental factors, which we address in the next section.

The FFF reveals the possibility of environmental forces as sources for change, though only a few studies were found using the RtoC search term. The research that exists with this perspective expands the examination of RtoC to include social pressures (Figure 2, superscript label 5).

What can best be described as social pressure has exerted on helping forces for organizational changes. As a recent example, consider the Black Lives Matter movement and changes to organizations’ DEI policies. While the specific research context of these social pressures in the RtoC literature has primarily centered around gender equality (with one paper in our sample addressing the social pressure involved with organizations’ changing role as it relates to politics), the following articles cohere with each other in that they acknowledge the role that the environment can play in helping organizational change.

Gregoric, Oxelheim, & Thomsen (2015) investigated Nordic companies’ responses to institutional pressure for having gender-balanced executive boards. Stronger visibility and social pressure lead to stronger organizational willingness to comply with external pressure for more female executive representation. Additionally, the likelihood that a firm will comply with societal pressure is positively correlated with the perceived strength of the societal and institutional pressure.

Mun & Jung (2018) reported that growth in foreign institutional ownership of Japanese organizations significantly improved gender diversity at board and managerial levels. Additionally, foreign institutional ownership increases the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and investor relations but only when 20% or more of the firm’s stock is held by foreign investors.

Bleijenbergh (2018) published her personal experiences of RtoC as she and colleagues tried to effect improvement in gender equity at four Dutch universities. Resistance primarily took the form of university leaders who would rebuff research findings that were presented to them, often in ways that were personal attacks on Bleijenbergh and her colleagues. Bleijenbergh also reported that over time, the university leaders who expressed resistance ultimately became champions for gender equality in their universities.

van Douwen, van den Brink, & Benschop (2022) found in a qualitative study of gender equality policy changes in the Dutch military that viewing RtoC as solely something for organizations to overcome was too myopic. The researchers examined the possibility that the very behaviors associated with resisting change, such as discourse, could lead one to reexamine and change their own assumptions about gender-related change initiatives.

Mumby, Thomas, Marti, & Seidl (2017) examined resistance as a manifestation of political intent or impact, against capitalism or other neoliberal forces as embodied in organizations. Resistance is an element in the exercise of power in the organization that affects organizational change. Political ramifications of change have intensified as people feel more tethered to work and their identities become associated with work. The result is that organizational change becomes subject to the exercise of power.

Our search reveals no articles that address environmental hindering forces, as they relate to RtoC (Figure 2, superscript label 6). Yet, one particularly promising environmental hindering force that has yet to be fully integrated into the organizational RtoC literature is cultural orientation toward change. Prolific change scholars Oreg & Sverdlik (2018) developed cultural orientation toward change (as a national culture-level analog of individual dispositional RtoC) to capture a culture’s predispositions to change versus stability. In particular, they examined 6,487 individuals across 27 countries and found three dimensions that constitute a country’s cultural orientation toward change: cultural rigidity, affective reactance and routine seeking.

Although this construct has clear implications for organizational RtoC, particularly as an environmental hindering force, cultural orientation toward change remains underdeveloped. Still, at the very least, future research on reactions to change should acknowledge the role of culture in influencing any findings based on a single country sample. Better yet, a comprehensive multilevel view of change, as it relates to organizations, could incorporate cultural orientation toward change as a cross-level moderator in a multi-country, multi-organization study.

Research on threat-rigidity effects provides fodder for the identification of environmental hindering forces (for a recent review, see Mazzei, DeBode, Gangloff, & Song, 2025). Resting on the assumptions of organizational inertia, threat-rigidity describes how organizations might revert to familiar responses (i.e. rigidity) in the face of threats and carries obvious implications for change research going forward. According to this theory, any threats can be a force that hinders organizational change. A recent summative theoretical framework (Sarkar & Osiyevskyy, 2018) identifies threats as originating from the technological/economic environment (e.g. 2007–2008 financial crisis in the US banking sector) and the human/social environment (e.g. Nike’s CSR crisis in the 1990s due to working conditions in suppliers’ factories). While a full review of this literature stream is outside the scope of this review, given the conceptual overlap (between threat-rigidity and RtoC) and the dearth of environmental hindering factors examined in the RtoC literature, insights from the threat-rigidity literature may help advance our understanding of the environment’s effects on organizational RtoC.

As can be seen in Figure 2, the FFF is a multilevel framework that acknowledges the fact that research on RtoC has addressed topics at multiple levels of analysis, with the logical implication that these levels likely interact to impact change consequences. Some empirical and theoretical research has lent support to this notion. For example, Shimoni (2017) conducted a qualitative study of two Israeli organizations through a habitus-oriented approach, “a cognitive construct that represents not the personal [Figure 2, superscript 1] or the social [Figure 2, superscript 4] roots of resistance, but the combined dialectic roots of the two” (p. 257). Shimoni concluded that RtoC is both a social and personal phenomenon.

Ford, Ford, & D’Amelio (2008) took a theoretical look at RtoC as a combination of change agents making sense of the change situation, the change recipient’s actions and the situation. As such, RtoC is a result of the agent-recipient dyad and the individuals involved. The authors discussed three effects change agents have. First, agents tend to try to make sense of the change recipients’ reactions to the change through their perspective rather than taking a more objective stance. Second, change agents, through their own actions and inactions, contribute to the change recipient’s reactions that are then seen by the change agents as resistant. Third, there are times when what the change agent calls RtoC can be a positive contribution to change.

The final element of the FFF depicts change consequences (indirect, long-term outcomes of change) that have been examined (see Figure 2, superscript label 7). Oreg et al.’s call to “be clear about the distinction between pre-change antecedents, change antecedents, explicit reactions, and change consequences” (2011, p. 513) involves a clear separation between RtoC and its consequences, rather than simply applying the term RtoC to anything negative that occurs at the prospect of a change or after a change. For example, Turgurt et al.’s (2016) work clearly conceptualized emotional exhaustion and avoided mislabeling it as RtoC.

Philip (2022) has supported the need for new models of supposed resistance in a complex world. We have developed such a model in the FFF, which takes a multilevel perspective to outline the individual/team, organization/agent and environmental helping and hindering forces relevant to change consequences. In doing so, this article addresses the complexity and lack of integration between change management (macro) and change response (micro) literatures characteristic of the research on RtoC since a prominent critique was raised around the imprecision of this term. The FFF also allows for the theoretically driven identification of future research, by highlighting the helping/hindering forces at various levels that have been under-researched or not yet integrated.

The FFF developed herein can be used as a “checklist” by managers attempting to understand the various factors relevant to any change management endeavor, with particular utility driven by the evidence-based foundation of the variables listed in the Figure. Further, the FFF can serve as a more sophisticated tool for teaching and training change management – allowing for discussions on the multilevel factors that learners need to consider in managing change. One potential instructional activity could involve tasking students with filling in a blank copy of the FFF and comparing their ideas to what research has identified.

In Table 1, we offer a list of possible future research questions. Beyond this list and the research streams we mentioned above that address organizational change (but have yet to be integrated into the change literature), we offer additional future research ideas below.

Starting from the bottom of the FFF, while team-level RtoC has been identified, there is simply a need for more team-level change research.

At the environmental level, helping forces represent a potentially fruitful avenue of inquiry. While social pressures (regarding topics such as gender equality and politics) have begun to be addressed from this perspective, other forces could certainly be integrated. One example is social activism (Briscoe & Gupta, 2016), which itself can contain many topics for change. In this sense, social activism might be construed as a demand for change stemming from the environment. Further, much has been written about the changing employment relationship in contemporary organizations, representing more protean and dynamic alternatives to lifelong company loyalty (Reitman & Schneer, 2008). As a more extreme, recent extension of this notion, gig work could play a helpful role in organizational change endeavors, given that gig work, by its nature, is even more ephemeral and changing. The evolving power dynamics between labor and management about work-from-home policies as the labor market tightens or loosens would also be a fascinating topic.

With respect to environmental hindering forces, little to no research has explicitly taken this perspective with respect to RtoC. Yet, as mentioned above, research from related areas seems likely to be relevant and could lead to fruitful integration and cross-disciplinary articles. Beyond the ideas we propose above, other theories that have yet to be fully integrated into the more individually oriented reactions to change literature could include institutional resistance to change (Acemoglu, Egorov, & Sonin, 2021) and isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Indeed, while our work highlights the potential contributions to change research that can be achieved by integrating other established literatures, space limitations here have prevented us from conducting a holistic, integrative, systematic literature review. In particular, such a review could iterate between inductive and deductive processes whereby additional search terms (from other established literatures) identified in the initial literature search could be used to conduct an expanded literature search inclusive of these additional terms, iterating until saturation is achieved and all relevant search terms have been identified. The focus of such a review could then be to integrate research from different “communities of practice” that examine the same underlying phenomenon (e.g. change) but have thus far done so in a siloed manner (Cronin & George, 2023).

Finally, all these future research ideas might advance the literature more effectively if conducted from a multilevel or mutually-causal perspective. While there has been a smattering of articles that suggest the importance of multiple levels of analysis in RtoC research, our literature review highlights the additional need for more research within this paradigm, addressing what might occur when these forces clash. Indeed, the conventional view of RtoC was inherently multilevel (see Figure 1), yet as research progressed, which focused on the individual level, and macro views developed independently, multilevel research has lagged behind. Moreover, there is little or no extant work that considers a variable, such as employee perception of change, as possibly a cause and simultaneously an effect in change management (Dent, 2003), functionally creating a virtuous or vicious cycle. In organizations, there are always numerous changes occurring at any point in time. As Zand & Sorensen (1975) demonstrated, for example, while it is true that refreezing causes the level of change success, the level of change success also causes the refreezing. They circularly reinforce each other and such relationships need to be explored.

This review updates Dent and Goldberg’s (1999) critique of “resistance to change” (RtoC), highlighting its complexity through a novel multilevel FFF. Analyzing 56 articles from 1999 to 2024, we find that RtoC is not an automatic response; employees often embrace change. The FFF organizes helping and hindering forces across individual, organizational and environmental levels, integrating micro and macro perspectives and addresses calls for clarity (Oreg et al., 2011) while identifying research gaps. By reframing RtoC as a negotiation of forces, the FFF fosters adaptive, resilient workplaces, redefining change management for a complex world.

The authors are extremely grateful to Special Issue Editor Kenneth Sweet and the anonymous reviewers for their contributions to improving this article.