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les. 问题4.审慎评估这个词的“变革阻力”的意思，它如何与权力的概念？说明相关理论和实例你的答案。

Answer:
The term as ‘resistance to change’ means a specific behaviour that people want to do what they are familiar in the work place, and thus refuse to alter the status quo situation (Greenberg & Baron 2008). For example, the accountants would like to use the same template to draft the financial report for each year. And the designers want to keep traceable indicators in the product series, etc. But for the management, they have the duty to make change for the company to adapt the fluctuate environment. Their actions to alter the ‘resistance of change’ can be seen as a presentation of power, as power is defined as some kind of ability to influence or control the behavior of people.

The behaviour of resistance to change can be explained by the rational person hypothesis. It argued that the rational person is risk averse and try to maximize the personal utility by choices (Posner 1998). For those who work in the company, the change will not only bring additional uncertainties but also excessive cost to lower their utilities. Such situation will not be change until there are external forces which changed the result of risk and reward. Because of that, the change will unavoidably experience resistance except it’s supported by the upper level of management, which represented as their power to the organisation.

In the rational person hypothesis, people make choice based on the calculation of risk and utility (Posner 1998). In general, people want to make choice to get more defined result with higher utility based on their existing knowledge. For most people working within organisation, they have limited knowledge to make choice. Especially, they have no comprehensive knowledge for the whole organisation to calculate the benefit of the change. But they only know their own utility situation for the change. In many circumstance, the change will generate defined and additional cost instantly like the cost of learning and adaption to the new situation. But its benefit might be uncertain and late to reflect. For example, when the streamline workers perform a new product, they have to learn new movements and working requirements, which might cause additional time and higher chance of errors. Even the new products will make the company earn more than before, the workers might only share a slight piece of the increased profit. And these benefits might come after months or years, or it might totally fail in the market. Because of that, if it’s decided by the streamline worker alone, it’s natural for the rational person to resist adopting the new product line. Because the workers might have to face a situation which has more uncertainty in benefit and definitely lead to less utility. Because of that, when the resistance of change happened, it needs support from higher level management to push the change forward. The management can use multiple approaches to execute the change, like appointing personnel, making positive incentives or negative punishments, etc. These abilities to make the change get implemented present their power to influence the people’s behaviour to fight against the resistance to change. Such superior power came from two sources, one is the information advantage. Another is the corresponding interest and responsibility distribution for the change.

It’s understandable that the management is also a rati