Coping with individuals' resistance to change

Probably every purchasing manager is familiar with the employee who just won't change. Sametimes it is easy to understand why: the employee might fear losing his or her job, notwant to learn new skills or notlook forward to join a new team. On most other occasions employee resistance is more difficult to understand. This chapter deals with the effects of individual behaviour on strategie change processes and how change leaders can anticipate or react to this. The impartanee of individual behaviour in such processes was already briefly mentioned in Chapter 2. Individual purchasers or buyers can play an active role in realizing change, a passive role or even actively resist change. The latter will be even more strongly demonstrated in Chapter 11 and- tosome extent- in Chapter 12. A better understanding of possible individual reactions to a change initiative, and the underlying reasons, may help the change leader to better manage the process. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to explore the effect of individual behaviour on the process of strategie change and to derive some lessans for rnanaging individual behaviour. The different concepts that are introduced in this chapter will be illustrated by the TradeRanger case. This case describes how a number of companies in the oii and chemieals industry developed and implemented an e-procurement tool.