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

After having analyzed the evolution of researchers’ think about resistance to change and all the possible problems related not only to the recipients but even to the agents, it is useful to focus on how to manage an organizational transformation. Improvements require to manage change, considering the possibility of having some resistance during this period of transition. The attitude to manage change has to be positive and not consider the resistance as recipients’ problem, but as an opportunity. Besides, managers have to consider even that is not only one of the two sides that caused resistance. The best starting point to manage a change and its resistance is that agents consider resistance as an opportunity that can increase the value of the final result. Indeed, it is more complex to operate change when people inside the organization are not interested in what happened in the firm. “Where a workplace is marked by apathy or passivity implementing change is a very difficult task (Litterer, 1973, p.152).” (Waddell & Sohal, 1998). The two academics refer to the other one to emphasize in their work that resistance can be a positive factor because it forces people to react and to expose their ideas. Therefore resistance is a decisive factor in analyzing how to change, and for this reason, agents must not avoid resistance or escape from it. Actuating one of these two behaviors would risk wasting an opportunity for a better transformation. To understand how to manage the resistance to change, it is useful to follow the path of change and analyze in each part, which is the best method to follow people and take advantage of resistance.