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

9 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