Abstract:
With rapid technological changes, organizations and individuals are faced with numerous
challenges as to how best to cope with and adapt to such changes. There can be forces
encouraging change and forces against change. This particular piece of research is
interested in investigating the second category: forces against change or resistance to
change. The researcher has defined five research objectives to investigate the factors
effecting individuals to resist information technology (IT) related change. The research
objectives were aimed at identifying organizational, individual and technological factors
influencing IT related change while the research also endeavoured to identify which
factors have the strongest influence in the change process. The fifth research objective
was concerned with providing suggestions to minimize resistance to IT related change. A
review of past research was used to identify the three main categories of resistance
factors (Individual, Technological, and Organizational) and these factors were tested in
the context of IT related change in the Sri Lankan Telecommunication sector, with
special emphasis on Dialog Telekom (Pvt) Ltd. from where a simple random sample of
220 was drawn for data gathering. A questionnaire was used as the data collection tool to
test the relationship between the above categories of factors with resistance to IT related
change. The respondents to the questionnaire included IT users from both managerial and
non-managerial levels at Dialog Telekom (Pvt) Ltd. representing all the departments.
Data gathered from the respondents were analysed using Spearman’s correlation as the
suitable statistical treatment. In the results obtained, the most striking finding is that when
technological factors were tested, it was revealed that only ‘the extent to which the user
requirements are met by the technology’ acts as a strong influencer in determining
resistance behaviour. Other factors such as system design; accessibility or usability of
the system shows no significant impact on resistance. Towards the latter part of the
thesis, recommendations and suggestions were discussed which could be useful to
practicing managers and scholars alike in managing and understanding resistance to IT
related change in organizations.
