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Study on the organizational resistance to innovation

Conference Paper · May 2016

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Innovation Management and Education Excellence Vision 2020: Regional Development to Global Economic Growth

Study on the Organizational Resistance to Innovation

Maier Dorin, PhD ec., PhD eng., Technical University of Cluj - Napoca, Romania,
E-mail: dorin.maier@gmail.com – corresponding author
Maftei Mihaela, PhD, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania, E-mail: mmaftei@ase.ro,
Keppler Timo PhD student, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania,
E-mail:keppler@eu-edu.li,
Maier Andreea, PhD, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania,
E-mail: andreea_mayer@yahoo.com

Abstract
The research results presented in this article refer to the implication of changing the non innovation
or less innovative organizations in to innovative ones. Innovation is one of the most important
characteristic for organizations worldwide in current market situation in a globalized economy.
Globalization brings fierce competition and strict challenges with meeting the ever-increasing market
and customer needs and expectations. Although everybody agrees that without innovation you cannot
be competitive and you cannot exist on the market, there is still a resistance to change. Our aim with
this research is to help managers to pas the initial resistance to innovation and to adopt innovation as
a key element in their organizations. We have identified the main causes of organizational resistance
to innovation and offered solutions to overpass this resistance. The results of the research can also be
useful for future research and we consider that this part of innovation resistance aspects, both from
customer and organization point of view, should be investigated more thoroughly.

Keywords: Innovation, change, resistance to innovation, change to innovation, organization

resistance.

Introduction
The current business environment, in a globalized economy, demands new approach from
organizations, in order to be competitive, profitable or event to resist on the market. In various
studies, like in Maier (2015), the response to the new requirements is to consider innovation as a key
element for organization, but innovation is not an easy thing, it requires some changes in the
organization culture and there will be always some adversities to the changing process.

In the same time innovation is one of the most important factors behind the growth and prosperity of
the global economy today but there is also an insufficient understanding of the innovation process. In
Legardeur (2010) we can find that over the last century, industry leaders have learned to master the
production process to such an extent that today it is not a significant competitive advantage.
According to Maier (2014), the new challenge is to master the process of innovation - capitalizing
change, creating new competitive advantages by offering better products by using better processes,
providing better service or offering entirely new solutions.

A good innovation culture can generate innovations which are turn into significant advantages and
big profits for the innovative organization and also can bring small outsiders in dominant position. In
Olaru (2015) we see that he basic idea in case of successful innovations is to understand the customer
needs and to develop the products and services that satisfy those needs. In the same time over time
the unpredictable character of innovation led to a wealth of failed innovation projects.

According to Vlachaki (2010) the resistance to change is illustrated by some organizations that tend
to developed themselves and to get used with what they do (basic skills) such that they get stuck
there, and when the environment changes (ex. changing customer requirements, changing
regulations) they are unable to adapt quickly and easily. We have oriented the research towards the
innovative culture and focused on the resistance to innovation from organization. On the literature the

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part, of the resistance to innovation is not well represented, there are few research oriented mainly on
the customer resistance to innovation, like Bruce (2013).

2. Changing Behavior of Individuals in an Organization

Innovation is currently a subject of great interest for scientists and practitioners, who consider that the
new way of creating prosperity is through innovation. Even if innovation is studied for a long time
there is still not developed a comprehensive theory of innovation that can be applied in any field, in
any condition and that can guarantee the success of the innovation process. History reveals that some
innovations, which seems very big and important, became just a technical virtuosity and other ones
with less or no expectation have turned into giant and profitable businesses.

In the beginning of the research we have focused on the individual resistance to innovation.
Innovation implies little of bigger change, first from individual level and then from the hole
organization. In the literature there are studies that deal with the process of transition and how people
react to change. A good visual presentation of the process of transition through change is the
transition curve processed by John Fisher. The transition curve is presented in figure 1.

Fig 1. John Fisher's personal transition curve (Processed by author from ***, 2016)

As it can be observe there are a series of state through which a person passes, we will briefly present
this stage according to Fisher. The first phase identified by Fisher is anxiety which appear, according
to various specialists, when individuals cannot predict the future, is more like the fear of unknown.
The second phase is happiness when something seem too happed, when a hope for a better
perspective of the future appear. It is more like a dream phase, in some cases with high expectation
and not necessary realistic ones.

The third phase is fear, this phase appear when the enthusiasm from the happiness phase begins to
decrease and some little changes in the behavior occur, most of this changes are inevitable and they
do not have a direct effect over situation, but they interpreted it like is a change that they also need to

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Innovation Management and Education Excellence Vision 2020: Regional Development to Global Economic Growth

do it. The fourth phase is the threat phase, this appear when the individual begins to realize that a
change will happen, that he will be transformed, that the older choice must be changed.

Guilt is the fifth phase; this phase appears when the individual is aware of the past mistakes and
realizes the inappropriateness of his previous actions and a sense of guilt develops inside him. From
this phase the individual can pass to a phase of depression or to a phase of disillusionment or both.
The phase of depression appears when individual sense a state of uncertainty over the future, over his
ability to cope with new demands. In this phase there is a lack of motivation and confusion. In
disillusionment phase the individual becomes unfocused, gradually withdraw his labor, unmotivated
or even resign. This phase is associated with the period in which the goals, the beliefs and own values
are different with those of the organization.

If the depression phase has a strong effect over the individual then is possible to pass to the hostility
phase, when individual continue to operate processes proved to be failure and ignore the new
processes. Another phase of rejection of change is the denial phase, defined by a lack of acceptance
of any change and denies that there will be any impact on the individual.

As it can be seen from the transition curve there are also two phase that embrace the change, one is
the phase of gradual acceptance and the other one is the moving forward phase. The gradual
acceptance phase is the phase when the individual begin to make sense of his place within the change
and he can see that he is going in a good direction, all this leads to an increasing level of self-
confidence. In the moving forward phase the individual has more control, acts with more confidence,
he is more positive and is starting to feel comfortable in this new situation.

The main conclusions from analyzing the transition curve are that in order to accept the change an
individual must first understand the impact of the change on his construct system, any change
regardless of size has an impact on the individual and generate a conflict between the existing
knowledge and the anticipated ones. The role of managers is to find ways to transmit the needed
information to every employee in order to understand the benefits of the change and to reduce the
size of the conflict between new and old.

The acceptation of any change for individuals is not an easy thing because peoples act based on the
previous experiences and those experiences can be positive ones, then the acceptation of change is
easier to achieve, or they can be bad experience then is more likely to deny any future changes.
Another interesting aspect is that a bad experience weighs much harder than a good experience in
decision to accept of not the change, in the literature there is a ratio of 1 to 10 between bad
experiences and good experiences.

3. Main Aspects that Led to Innovation Resistance

Innovation is a complex phenomenon, its success depends on a series of factors that cannot be
controlled or exactly predicted. Innovation involves novelty, and to obtain novelty you should always
force the limits. A very small percent of successful innovations came as a result of a genius idea;
most of the innovations are the results of hard work performed during an innovation process. In order
to have a successful innovation process a successful organizational innovation culture must exist to
make possible to transform an idea into innovation.

The complexity of innovations leads to a series of different spectrum of responses to innovation; we

have analyzed the aspects related with resistance to innovation. Fist types of innovations are those
where there is no risk and no attempt to modify the existing habit. This type of innovation is
considered as having a no resistance to innovations. But this type of innovations, with almost no risks
is likely to transform the organization and have exponential growth.

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Innovation Management and Education Excellence Vision 2020: Regional Development to Global Economic Growth

The second type of innovations, when dealing with resistance to innovations, is those that have low
risks but it involves some changes in the organizational culture of the company. As in case of first
type of innovation adoption of the second type does not bring major profits or large growth for
organizations. Another type of innovation is that involve high risks and changes in the organizational
culture.

Innovation comprise in a number of activities that involve a certain degree of freedom for employees.
This is more important in case of organizations that have a long period of existence on the market,
their experience is formed by a certain way of dealing with employees, and the change to a different
way is not always welcomed. By analyzing the individual perception to change and overlapping this
resistance to change over the particularities of innovation we have identified some key aspects that
influence the perception of innovation in an organization. In this research we have limited to the
aspects that are in a manner controlled by every organization and we omitted the independent one,
like the changing of the environment, the legislative change and so on.

A first aspect is related to the relation between the innovation resistance and the advantages of
innovation. In this case the increase of innovation resistance is directly influenced by his advantages
and disadvantages, the higher the perceived disadvantages the higher is the innovation resistance.
Innovation is an unpredictable process and it is obvious that for any organization, no matter the size
of it, in order to proceed in creating an innovation the advantages must overpass the disadvantages.

The perceived of risk associated with innovation is another aspect that influence the innovation
resistance. For an organization when dealing with innovation it involve also adoption and acceptance
of an existing risk, because the final result of an innovation is given by the client. This means that
there is always the possibility of failure even if from the innovation process there are no major
mistakes. The size of the risk that a company is willing to accept or it can handle influence the
innovation resistance.

Another aspect that influences the innovation resistance for an organization is the complexity of the
innovation process. It is known that in order to be a successful a innovation must be as much as
simple possible. From organization point of view the higher the complexity of innovation the higher
is its resistance to adopt it. The complexity of the innovation is given by two characteristics, the
simplicity of the idea and the simplicity of execution, in this case it is important that this two
characteristics to be as simple as possible in order to overcome the innovation resistance.

4. Overcoming the Innovation Resistance

As we saw in the previous chapters innovation is a very important characteristic of today’s

organizations. Although many organizations are aware of the importance of innovation in the current
economic context, there is still a big innovation resistance among managers. Based on the above
identified aspects, that influence the innovation resistance, we have formulated some key elements
that every manager should consider in order to transform their organizations in to an innovative one
and thus into a more competitive and profitable.

A first element is that the speed of adoption innovation will depend on the individuals self perception,
other past experience and control position, and how these are combine to create the future perception
of innovation. In this case managers need to be able to transmit clearly the advantages of every
innovation process for the organization and in the end for each employee. Once the importance of
innovation is well understood the innovation resistance will decrease.

The risk perceiving to innovation process is another aspect that need to be consider by managers. It is
very hard and mostly impossible to eliminate any risk associated to innovation, as we said, innovation
is a very hard to predict process, and the final results is influenced by a lots of factors and many of
them cannot be controlled only by an organization. One of the possibilities to reduce the risk is to

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Innovation Management and Education Excellence Vision 2020: Regional Development to Global Economic Growth

transform the final result of the innovation in something with a high percent of the capability to be
tried by the final customers, usually in form as a trial. This can be considering as the easiness on how
customer can try the innovation before they adopt it.

Another element is related to the simplicity of innovation. Managers should consider that in case of
innovation is better to have a simple idea and a easy way of achieve it. The process of finding a good
and simple idea is not an easy one, it is important that within the organization to exist a good
innovation culture. There are a lot of studies related to a successful innovation culture and its main
characteristics therefore there should not be any problem for manager to adopt an innovative culture
in their organizations.

5. Conclusions

Innovation, due to its complexity, is one of the most studied topics in the literature today. We
consider that the results of our research are very useful both for practitioners and for scientists. This
part of innovation, the part where aspects related to resistance to adopt, to begin or to receive
innovation are analyzed, is poorly covered in the scientific literature. A solution for a less difficult
and negative journey to a successful innovation is the positive view of the outcome.

We consider that this research results can be used as a base for future studies in this area, and that the
part of the innovation resistance, from different points of view, is a topic that must be thoroughly
examined due to its importance for organizations worldwide

References

Bruce D. Fischer, and Elmhurst College (2013), Management Resistance to Innovation, American
Journal of Management vol. 13(1)

Legardeur, J.C., 2010. New projects evaluation method for the 24h of innovation. Proceedings of
ERIMA, iss. 2010, pp. 177-185.

Maier, D., Olaru, M., Weber, G. and Maier, A., (2014), Business Success By Understanding The
Process Of Innovation. In: s.n., The 9th European Conference on innovation and Entrepreneurship –
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Maier, D., Anastasiu, L., Sarbu, R., Eidenmuller, T., and Maier, A., (2015), Measuring the capacity
of organizations innovation-major process of innovation management, Amfiteatru Economic,
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Maier, D., Olaru, M. and Maier, A., (2013). Integrating concepts of innovation and creativity - a key
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Olaru, M., Dinu, V., Mateiu, A., Keppler, T., and Mocan, B., (2015), Study on the adoption of open
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Purcărea, I. and Olaru, M., (2011). Paving the Path for Innovation: the case of Romanian SMEs. , The
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***, (2013), CEN/TS 16555-1 Innovation management – Part 1: Innovation management system

***, (2016), https://www.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/949533/fisher-transition-curve-

2012.pdf accesed on february 2016

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