Abstract
D.Phil.
One of the principal reasons people form organisations is to focus attention and
energy on a selected goal - this goal being the provisioning of products and/or
services to clients. Due to forces demanding change, organisations are required to
change to be able to continue their existence, making change unavoidable and part
of the organisation's life cycle. The premise is that if change is unavoidable, it needs
to be managed to serve the best interests of the organisation, thus the need for
change management.
Research indicates that 50 to 75% of all major corporate change efforts fail and that
resistance is the "little-recognised but critically important contributor'' to the failure of
change efforts, and central to the change problem. Also, central to the change
problem and successful change management lie the following factors:
• The reality that people tend to resist change.
• The issue of measurement for change management intervention purposes.
Research Objectives
The objectives of this study are divided into literature and empirical research
objectives, each posing primary and secondary objectives.
The primary literature review objective is to create a theoretical frame of reference
for the interrelated concepts of change, change management and barriers-to-change.
The primary empirical research objective is to apply Barriers-to-Change
Questionnaire (BCQ), developed in meeting the literature review objectives, to a
Governmental service delivery type organisation with the purpose of determining
which barriers-to-change is evident in such an environment.
Literature Research
A review of the literature revealed that there is no integrated view on change and
barriers-to-change, but it also revealed that the concept of barriers-to-change has
been prominent in organisational and management literature for quite some time.
However, no evidence could be found of a measuring instrument focused on
measuring barriers-to-change as a whole.
During the literature research the concepts of organisational development,
organisational change, change management, resistance to change and barriers-tochange
were investigated, clarified and reported upon.
The above-mentioned concepts were integrated into a theoretical frame of reference
called the SCM, which served the purposes of providing a framework from where
barriers-to-change can be understood, explained and managed as well as providing
a firm base from where the BCQ was developed to measure barriers-to-change in a
specific environment.
It was concluded, for the purposes of this study, that barriers-to-change can be
grouped into two types of barriers, being hard and soft. It was also concluded that
there are four causes (or groupings) of barriers-to-change, being barriers inherent to
the change project, people barriers, organisational barriers and barriers from the
environment, each with specific sub-dimensions. Each sub dimension is supported
by an appropriate number of questionnaire items, contained in the BCQ, which were
administered to the target organisation.