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122 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

informing workers are required, and not all companies can make virtual
work effective.

Understanding Organizational Resistance to Change
Information systems inevitably become bound up in organizational politics
because they influence access to a key resource—namely, information.
Information systems can affect who does what to whom, when, where, and
how in an organization. Many new information systems require changes in
personal, individual routines that can be painful for those involved and require
retraining and additional effort that may or may not be compensated. Because
information systems potentially change an organization’s structure, culture,
business processes, and strategy, there is often considerable resistance to them
when they are introduced.
There are several ways to visualize organizational resistance. Research on
organizational resistance to innovation suggests that four factors are paramount:
the nature of the IT innovation, the organization’s structure, the culture of peo-
ple in the organization, and the tasks impacted by the innovation (see Figure
3.7). Here, changes in technology are absorbed, interpreted, deflected, and
defeated by organizational task arrangements, structures, and people. In this
model, the only way to bring about change is to change the technology, tasks,
structure, and people simultaneously. Other authors have spoken about the
need to “unfreeze” organizations before introducing an innovation, quickly
implementing it, and “refreezing” or institutionalizing the change (Kolb, 1970).
Because organizational resistance to change is so powerful, many informa-
tion technology investments flounder and do not increase productivity. Indeed,
research on project implementation failures demonstrates that the most
common reason for failure of large projects to reach their objectives is not the
failure of the technology, but organizational and political resistance to change.
Chapter 14 treats this issue in detail. Therefore, as a manger involved in future
IT investments, your ability to work with people and organizations is just as
important as your technical awareness and knowledge.

FIGURE 3.7 ORGANIZATIONAL RESISTANCE TO INFORMATION SYSTEM
INNOVATIONS

Implementing information systems has consequences for task arrangements, structures, and people.
According to this model, to implement change, all four components must be changed simultaneously.

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