Informal Networks and Resistance to Organizational Change: The Introduction of Quality Standards in a Transport Company

In this paper we investigate the association between resistance to the introduction of ISO quality standards in a transport company and three effects of the informal advice and trust networks in the organization. The analysis includes four prevailing explanations from the literature on organizational resistance: job satisfaction, perceived legitimacy, unit grouping and decision making authority. The network effects we propose are: (a) a contagion effect, which predicts that members with the same opinion tend to have close or equal trust and advice relations; (b) a prominence effect, which predicts that prominent actors in the trust network show less resistance than other members—and that prominent members of the advice network show more resistance than less prominent actors; (c) a role equivalence effect, which predicts that members with the same patterns of combined trust/advice relations show the same resistance. The paper presents the operationalization and measurement of the variables and the results of three analyses to test the effects. Contagion of resistance appears to be very significant in the trust network. Resistance gradually erodes in the trust network when moving from management to employees. Members who are trusted in the transport company are significantly less resistant to the introduction of the quality standards than members who are not especially trusted. This network effect is controlled for the significant effects of job satisfaction and perceived legitimacy. The role equivalence structure of the combined trust/advice network does not explain the resistance. We conclude that informal networks have important effects on resistance to the proposed changes in the transport company. The case study shows how network analysis can be used to empirically test for effects of social relations in organizations.