Resistance (Psychological Roots)
Introduction
The psychological roots of organizational resistance to change:
“…substantiate the notion that the nature of resistance is primarily attributable to the personality and the emotional status of an individual as opposed to being a behavioural stress response…”
KI Sivaprasad et al, 2025
The Big 5 Personality Traits (Five-Factor Model) is widely used as a framework in personality psychology. The 5 dimensions are:
- Openness to Experience (sometimes “Intellect/Openness”) – curiosity, willingness to try new things, creativity
- Conscientiousness – self-discipline, organisation, reliability
- Extraversion – sociability, assertiveness, positive emotionality
- Agreeableness – cooperation, trust, kindness, helpfulness, etc
- Neuroticism – emotional instability with a tendency to experience negative emotions (anxiety, moodiness).
In simple terms, each person can be placed somewhere on each dimension (rather than being purely one type). These traits have been shown to predict a range of outcomes: job performance, leadership, adaptation, change readiness, well-being.
Linking personality, change reactions and resistance
Research largely focuses on how individual differences (including personality) influence how people respond to organisational change: their attitudes, behaviours adjustment. A few key points:
- The notion of dispositional resistance to change: a stable tendency of a person to resist (or be less comfortable with) change which influences how they react when a specific organisational change is proposed.
- It has been found that both personality traits and contextual/organisational factors matter. For example: trust in leadership, information about change, social influence, organisational context all play a role in shaping resistance.
- More specifically, it has been found that certain Big 5 traits (not all) correlate with this dispositional resistance. For example: low openness to experience tends to correlate with higher resistance to change; higher neuroticism likewise.
- There is a sequence of change reactions: personality/disposition to explicit reactions (affective, cognitive, behavioural) to change outcomes (job satisfaction, commitment, turnover intent).
(main source: Shaul Oreg, 2006)