Change, Resistance to Change and Organizational Cynicism

Abstract

Abstract Over the past decades, the focus of the scientists has shifted towards the area of organizational change. The concept has been approached from several perspectives and studied by numerous disciplines and refers to a shift or transformation of an organization, of several components of the organization or of the processes that lie within. Being in an environment characterized by competitiveness and complexity, organizations are under a constant need of change, of progress, while the aim of each change is to improve the aspects that make this happen. The dynamics of the labour force market has contributed to the creation of an environment in which organizations are permanently facing the need to implement various changes regarding their strategy, structure, processes or culture. Henceforth, the factors that can alter the implementation of change benefit from an increased focus. Understanding the reason for which some employees can resist change can have major financial implications for the organization. When considering the human resources involved in the change, nothing seems simple; most of the times things are not as they should be, and most of the employees experience a resistance to change, sometimes in the form of change-specific cynicism, a notion defined as the belief of employees that the organization in which they work lacks integrity. This paper represents the cultural adaptation of Change-Specific Cynicism Scale (a scale proposed by David J. Stanley in 1998, validated on the Canadian population), to the specifics of the Romanian population and supplies a method of evaluating change-specific cynicism for the specialized literature. Statistic results have shown that the Change-Specific Cynicism Scale has a high level of internal consistency (α=0,84) and can be used exclusively for equivalent populations. Moreover, this paper aims to approach the term organizational cynicism and its role in the context of organizational change.