Dispositional Resistance to Change - Article Example

or the study is to validate that the RTC scale measures the dispositional resistance to change and that it accurately reflects ‘resistance to change’ as a personality factor that correlates appropriately with other personality factors like neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience and agreeableness and conscientiousness. This is a significant research as earlier research into resistance to change have been confined to the environmental and external factors and how individuals may respond to change in a given situation.

This study also presented a literature survey that established this fact. It presented the research by various scholars like Armenakis, Harris, & Mossholder, 1993; Bartunek, Rosseau, Rudolph, & DePalma, 2006; Fedor, Caldwell, & Herold, 2006; Kiefer, 2005; Ameniakis et al., 1993; Bartunek et al., 2006; Fedor et al., 2006; Kiefer, 2005; which either claim that resistance to change is merely behavioral issue or merely an emotional or cognitive one. The current study also dwelt on Oreg’s contention that resistance to change is more holistic and based on disposition.

This is among the very few studies on the topic of resistance to change that takes the dispositional approach and indicate that resistance to change depends upon the make-up of the individuals. The findings from this study are expected to benefit organizations and managers in understanding individual resistance to change and provide insight about overcoming it. The study was conducted using an RTC scale (Oreg, 2003) and a short version of the NEO PI-R, the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992). The RTC scale measured the dispositional resistance to change using 17 items that had responses in the range of 1 to 6 intensity with 1 denoting strongly disagree and 6 strongly agree.

The NEO-FFI is based on the FFM personality scale and it uses sixty items, 12 each per trait to measure the overall personality traits. The population selected for the study was from Norwegian University of