Understanding Resistance to Change: An Experiential Exercise

Abstract

Organizational change remains one of the challenging concepts for students in leadership and organizational behavior classes to internalize if they have not experienced it directly. This exercise serves as a means for simulating the change process through a firsthand experience of change at a personal level. The assignment involves students choosing to experience a personal change (e.g., abstaining from a habit) for 3 weeks, maintaining a log of daily experiences, and writing a summary of the takeaways from their experience. Most of the students find it challenging to complete the task successfully (i.e., maintain total abstinence), which contributes to a lively follow-up discussion on successfully leading change and gives the students an opportunity to understand various challenges related to change implementation. This exercise can be used with a range of graduate and undergraduate courses in management curricula as well as in other leadership development programs.