Organizational Change during crises. The transition to E-learning at the university of Udine during the COVID 19 emergency

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Introduction 
The thesis analyzes the resistance that generally occurs during and after changes in 
organizations, and in particular, the main focus is on the resistances generated by a forced 
change. The final focus is on the resistances caused by the use of e-learning. Researchers 
have already discussed this topic a lot, but they do not agree on the origin of this problem. 
They have various visions about who generates resistance and why it occurs. The 
presence of the resistance is considered a normal phase that has to be stepped over. Many 
researchers, indeed, do not consider that considerable improvements can happen without 
a high level of resistance because it should mean that people are in their comfort zone 
and do not perceive that transformation. This means that if people inside the organization 
do not notice that there is a change, it is probably so small that it cannot be defined as a 
real transformation in the organization. The real problem is how this kind of resistance, 
present in the organization during the phase of change, can be reduced. Many factors 
influence people, and this depends on many different variables. Understanding the 
origin of the problems, researchers studied even different methods to adopt for reducing 
it. As just said before, academics have different opinions on who generates resistance, but 
the solutions to reduce this phenomenon are almost the same. To lessen these situations, 
they studied that better results are obtained involving recipients in the organizational 
transformations. This condition is not too easy to apply but became almost impossible in 
the cases of forced change. It, generally, happens suddenly, and it is imposed by the state 
or some authorities outside the firm. The consequences are quite different from the 
typical improvements, which can create problems between agents and recipients. Indeed, 
in this case, they cannot do anything to resolve the problem, and all the solutions found 
for the classical resistance are generally useless.  
In this thesis, the last half regards proper the revolution that the pandemic involved 
all the firms and universities. With Sars-Cov-2, the world had to deal with a critical and 
unexpected condition which generated many evaluations on the way of conducting 
business, and more in general activities. It is the first time that Italy, but many other
Introduction 
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countries, block all their activities for a virus, imposing to their citizens a “lockdown.” It 
is precisely under situations like this one that the organizations have to be ready to react 
to the forced change. This stressful challenge obliged all the universities that had face-to-
face lessons to move all their teaching online. The complexity was generated by the short 
time available. Therefore, in this period of Coronavirus, all the people must stay at home 
in quarantine, and this creates problems not only for the academic offer but even for the 
students’ motivation degree. 
Here the thesis found its ground, during a period of forced change for all the 
structures, in particular for the academics one. This dissertation has analyzed the 
problems related to the organizational resistance, and then it focused on forced change, 
which hit the University of Udine. It was created a survey to study how the “resistances”, 
which are caused by this forced change, have influenced students. Through the 
questionnaire, it was possible to focus on the three principal aspects of the forced change 
during this switch from face-to-face lessons to online ones and understand which are 
those that influence more students. These primary resistances are the lack of resources, 
the different environment for studying, and the lack of motivation due to the 
impossibility to modify the change. All these three considerations incise the change that 
students have to deal with in this difficult period. The possibility to understand which is 
the more significant issue that influences and makes change difficult is an essential 
consideration to remember for the future. Indeed, knowing which are the transformation 
weakness, it is possible remedies or at least reduces them. Therefore, from this thesis, it 
should be possible to obtain a clear vision on which aspects are more critical during 
online lessons. The University of Udine can use it to structure future strategies for 
reducing problems related to the online lessons and prevent, a little, some negative 
resistances.  
The thesis is structured in four principals chapters that analyze all these things, 
starting from the general aspects to the more detailed, which is presented in the last one, 
with the questionnaire.
Introduction 
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   Chapter 1. Chapter one focuses on organizational change and all its general aspects, 
which are connected to it. After a brief introduction about change definition, which are 
the types of change and its positive and negative aspects, chapter number one focuses on 
how and what to change. This chapter, therefore, introduces the literature about change, 
resting on the principal models. It is useful to introduce the argument about change, 
which is the basis of the resistance behaviors. 
Chapter 2. Chapter two explains the individual resistance to organizational change. 
This chapter starts with the considerations about resistance and the different academics 
theories, which analyze who and why people make resistance to change. After this part, 
there is an analysis of each problem caused by the recipients and by the agents. It is 
necessary for the next step that, understanding which are the problems during a change, 
evaluate some possible solutions to manage them. The second chapter ends with a focus 
on forced change, that is peculiar because both recipients and agents are involved and 
cannot do anything to modify this particular type of change. 
Chapter 3. This chapter connects the previous part with the second one; indeed, from 
a theoretical aspect, it switches to the practical one with the questionnaire. This chapter 
explains the current pandemic situation and how it has influenced the way of conducting 
business for the organizations and of attending lessons for students during this phase 
caused by a change forced.  
Chapter 4. This last chapter is the core of the entire thesis,  and it focuses entirely on the 
students of the University of Udine and their relationship with this forced change that 
obliged them to say at home to follow lessons. After the context introduction, this chapter 
is subdivided into two parts. The first one explains the method, the reference population, 
and in the end, it focuses on the questionnaire development. The second part exposes all 
the data collected by this survey, and for every question shows the students’ answers, 
making a division between attending students and non-attending ones. Besides, this part 
shows even the different and high correlations between the various answers given by the 
students.
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Chapter 1  
Organizational change 
 
1.1 Definition of organizational change  
The world is composed of organizations of each type, and everywhere they are critical 
to us to do things. They are organized structures that coordinate different tasks. 
Organizations can obtain some goals and results that otherwise would not be possible to 
reach for a single individual. “Every organized human activity gives rise to two 
fundamental and opposing requirements: 1. the division of labor into various tasks to be 
performed and 2. the coordination of these tasks to accomplish the activity” (Mintzberg 
H. , 1983).  
Different theories focus on division and specialization. The first economist to talk 
about this is Adam Smith, in 1776. He described the division of labor as a method for 
increasing industries’ productivity. The base concept is that specialized people can 
operate only on a particular task, and this permits them to improve their capability of 
problem-solving. The main issue is that every single specialist/task has to be coordinated 
with the other to obtain an organization that works well. 
This high specialization of work permits firms to compete between them and to fight 
for increasing productivity. Manage the organization inside the firm is a crucial element 
to remain on the market but is not sufficient. These structured entities must continuously 
be updated and must change to follow and possibly predict the market to reach the set 
target that otherwise will not be possible to obtain. Change is one of the most important 
and current challenges that all firms have to take. 
Transformation is an essential characteristic for the people and even more for the 
organization. Not change does not mean standstill, maintaining its position on the 
market, but instead intends to fall back and lose market position to their detriment. 
Losing competitiveness due to not transformation of the firm happened because the
Chapter 1. Organizational change 
 
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environment is not fixed and change at every moment. This environmental change 
creates in every moment new winners and new losers. One typical example is Kodak’s 
company and the digitalization process where the firm had, in its hand, the possibility to 
change and innovate itself and increase more its position, but prefer not to do it. They do 
not make this transformation losing a significant part of its market. 
If the firm can coordinate all the internal activities and, in particular, it can manage the 
change will be able in the “worst-case” remain only on the market, in the better case, 
increase its productivity and competitiveness. Control and change internal activities 
permit the firm to reduce difficulties and problems caused by the external environment.  
External transformation is difficult to predict for the firm because it depends on many 
factors. It depends on political considerations, customers, and competitors’ decisions. 
However, if the organization can understand what to change to forecast the market, this 
would be a substantial comparative advantage.  
Change, in general, is a process for changing something in an organization because the 
firm has to adapt to meet the shifting demands. The objective is to maximize the joint 
efforts of all people involved in the change trying to make the transformation easy. The 
difference is how the firms and leaders can manage this situation, which generally is very 
complicated.  
This topic is deeply felt, in particular by the Human Resource and, of course, by 
Change Management staff, where they must encourage people inside the organization to 
follow the manager’s change. The main problem is that the human mind is largely 
neophobia; this means that the people do not want to change.  Transformations are not 
natural because, as Founder and AD’s HC - Capaci di Futuro said, change is not a fight 
against something outside the people but inside them (Zapelli, 2019). 
At this point, it can be useful to understand the definition given by Cawsey to 
Organizational Change, that is: “[…] planned alterations of organizational components 
to improve the effectiveness of the organization.” (Cawsey, 2012).  
In this case, for organizational components, the authors mean every single element 
present in the firm. It is starting from mission and vision to people that make up the
Chapter 1. Organizational change 
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organization itself, passing through process goals and strategy. It is crucial to focalize on 
the word “planned alterations” because every single change in the firm has to be planned, 
generally by a team. A planned action permits them to obtain, with more probability, a 
precise result. Only in this case is it possible to achieve and to carry on some solution that 
will be useful for the firm to be more competitive on the market. Change is a step forward 
from one situation to another one, and often formal action or procedure is altered 
permanently until the next transition. 
In general, however, change can be described as a slow and challenging learning 
process that permits the firm to organize all the resources inside it. There are present 
many sources about organizational change that subdivided it into different categories, 
for example: 
o planned vs. unplanned: in this case is considered if the firm studies and prepares 
itself for the transformation, or it is a casual situation where the firm finds itself; 
o rapid vs. slow: the change can be slow and gradually, and so it requires more time 
to increment it. Generally, it reduces problems for people because it is gradual, 
and people can assimilate these conditions. Instead, managers actuate rapid 
changes when they are in particular circumstances of emergency; 
o revolutionary vs. evolutionary: this condition is necessary to understand which 
kind of change the firm has to take and the resources that must spend to reach that 
particular result. Revolutionary change is generally rapid and creates a significant 
and radical transformation. Evolutionary transformation is generating gradually 
and comports minus problems for employees and people that suffer this change.  
o Internally vs. externally driven: the first condition is if the firm decides to change 
because it wants to reach some specific goals or wants to restructure its 
organization. The second condition is when the firm reacts to external stimuli 
generated by the environment, for example, a new political condition or a 
particular situation present in its market;
Chapter 1. Organizational change 
 
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o anticipatory vs. reactive: a good firm can anticipate the market and to predict the 
future market’s status and change previously obtain a comparative advantage. 
Other firms react to the market and change only when the external case is clear; 
o major vs. minor: changes can concern major transformation, for example, 
acquisition, outsourcing, mergers. Otherwise, other changes can be minor and 
refer, for instance, to department reorganization, installation of new technologies, 
or new incentive systems;  
o tangible vs. intangible: physical transformations are more comfortable to evaluate, 
to plan, and to see the result, and for these reasons, managers prefer them. 
Immaterial changes are more complex to assess, and, for this reason, the other ones 
are preferred. An example of invisible transformation is, for example, the shift in 
organizational culture.  
Researchers are not able to say which is the best combination of change to survive and 
increment the organization because it depends on the firm and on the environment in 
which they operate. Sometimes is necessary rapid and radical changes to survive in the 
market, but other times it is better an incremental and slow transformation to reduce the 
people resistance. 
Considering potential risks when the organization has to deal with transformation, are 
mainly two: the first one is that the firm does not have a strategy to manage the change, 
and the likelihood is that the result will not be useful and risky for the firm. The second 
one is that the firm does not consider the possibility of making a change inside its 
organization. They postponed this problem in a second moment when the firm could not 
have the resource to make a significant effort to close the gap between them and the 
competitors’ firms. 
The organizational change is and should be an essential operation for the 
organizations that want to follow the environment world change. There are different 
types of change, but the final result is that the firm has to be competitive on the market 
and to do this, it must change. The firm, generally, must modify its strategy, process, 
product, or organization to be met the market need.
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It is not essential if the firm is the best in its sector or not. All firms must make 
organizational changes to remain on the market. It is most common to see the best firms 
spend time and money on changing, respect to small and medium enterprises. It is quite 
common because, in general, change something is not easy or fast and require specific 
competencies that not all the firms can obtain. Furthermore, changes are generally 
expensive, and the benefits derived from, for example, a cost-saving transformation. Of 
course, it depends on the type of change because it can be little and incremental, and this 
does not require much effort, or it can be radical, and this can create several problems of 
management and costs.  
These changes generally create a sort of endpoint that permits to decree the beginning 
of a new period where the people in the firm will have to start to operate and get used to 
this further improvement.  
Summering these concepts, the firms choose to change for there different reasons: 
1. Performance. Firms want to improve their efficiency to meet or anticipate external 
environment factors. 
2. Development. Organizations have to improve or investigate a cost-saving strategy 
through lean manufacturing 
3. Transformation. Firms want to grow or expand through new corporate. To do this, 
they have to acquire firms or mergers with others. 
Another important consideration for the managers when they focus on change is to 
consider organizational change as systemic. If they want to obtain the goals saw in the 
previous paragraph, they have to evaluate change as a system. 
There are three main reasons to consider change objectives as systemic: 
1. Managers must evaluate the whole organization. A change in one part modifies 
the total system, and they cannot assess only the specific area where change has 
made. The risk is that the transformation will not work. 
2. Change leaders must consider the target for change as a group with its identity 
and not the single people. This mentality permits them to understand and pay 
attention to the organization’s culture that sometimes is difficult to identify.
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3. “[…] should be systemic relates to the open-system characteristics of importation 
of energy and negative entropy. For an organization to survive energy must be 
taken into the organization in a variety of forms and transformed into products or 
services,” and the entropic process must be reserved.” (Burke, Organization 
Change: Theory and practice, 2014, p. 85-86) 
 
1.2 Positive and negative aspects of change 
Organizational change is a complex set of actions that can happen in stressful 
situations or otherwise in a normal condition. In the first case, the firm has to react rapidly 
to resolve the problem and to keep calm its staff. In the second condition, the organization 
continuously changes to be competitive on the market. These two different types of 
methods can occur in various transformations inside the organization and depend on the 
external environment and the situation in which the firm finds itself, but even from the 
management decisions. A firm that will adopt a continuous improvement has less 
probability of having to do a significant transformation during its life.  
Changes can derive from a structural improvement, a cost-saving strategy, a 
product/process renovation, or even from cultural enhancement. This different 
transformation requires more or fewer efforts and energies by managers and consultants. 
For example, reconfigure the entire structure of the company is not only expansive but 
also really complicated in terms of power to manage this transformation. Even more 
complicated can be the transformation of cultural enhancement and other intangible 
assets. Instead, it is easier for the reduction of costs that focalize their primary activities 
on the elimination of non-core businesses that are not useful. 
Summarizing, the transformations that do not rise many times are more challenging 
to control and manage. Because from one part, these changes are significant, and from 
the other side, people are not prepared and trained for these changes.  
However, in all these situations, managers and change leaders must consider all the 
positive and negative aspects before to improve their firms. It is relevant because even a 
useful or necessary transformation can lose its “power” if it is not managed correctly.
Chapter 1. Organizational change 
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Changes are broken phases where they must act carefully. It is not easy neither for the 
people that endure the change nor for the employer that must perform it.  
The negative aspects of the two parts that participate in organizational change are 
different. In particular, the people that endure the transformation do not want to modify 
their way of doing the job because they are used to do it in a precise way. Besides, people 
do not want to exit from their comfort zone, and they do not understand why they should 
do it. As just said before, the main problem is that the human mind is mostly neophobia. 
(Zapelli, 2019)  
At the same time, not all the managers know how to conduct the change and if it will 
be beneficial for the firm, but they must try if they want to go ahead. Furthermore, if 
organizational changes are radical or can create some problems against employees, they 
must negotiate and discuss even with the labor union, who want to defend employees. 
This situation complicates further the issues relatively transformation in the firm. 
Organizational change has not only negative aspects. Indeed it allows obtaining a 
comparative advantage on the market and following the environment and its changing. 
The main problem is that positive aspects are often not visible in the short term but only 
in the medium and long one. This time lag creates a problem for organizational 
improvement because people have more difficult to make efforts to reach some results 
that maybe, in the future, will not be efficient or will not work.  
Intangible improvements are worst to manage than tangible ones because they depend 
on the people who undergo changes. For these, it is necessary to give importance to the 
entire process but, above all, to the results. Only doing this the people understanding 
what they are doing for the firm and how much it is crucial. Employees who understood 
why this change is essential and their role inside it, they are capable of working in a way 
that will give importance to this improvement. 
Negative and positive aspects are correlated not only by the external environment but 
even more by the internal environment, for example, the relationship between 
employees, the role of the change leader, and other factors that influence transformation.