Resistance in organizational change : Surrey campus expansion program at SFU/

The main purpose of this field study is to evaluate the current change process of the Surrey Campus Business Program Design and to identify the associated risks, challenges and opportunities in relation to the impacts it has on the faculty members at SFU Burnaby Campus. By choosing a project charter as a model to develop a contract to commence this project, we attempted to give a clear image about what, why, when, how, and where we will do this project to satisfy our client's needs. We embarked on a series of interviews with both committee and faculty members to glean data about the different perspectives towards this change initiative. We used the eight factors of the Inspire Action Method for Leading Organizational Change to analyze the collected data and to make a comparison between committee and faculty members. The eight factors are Strategic alignment, Business case, Change leadership, Communication, Stakeholder perspective, Create commitment, Resilient teams, and Aligned performance. We found a large gap between the knowledge and perception of committee members and those of professors who will be impacted by this change. From the results of our field study, we were very interested in the resistance to the organizational change so we reviewed the relevant professional and research literatures on sources of resistance to change, the contribution of the resistance, types of resistance and made some suggestions for how to manage resistance in this specific case.