Managing resistance to change in strategy implementation in public universities in Kenya:A case study of the University Of Nairobi.

Abstract

Organizations find themselves constantly implementing changes in order to align themselves with the increasingly turbulent environment and to meet their objectives, and the Public Universities are no exception. Some of the factors attributing to the turbulence in the environment include political, globalization, socio-economic legislative, competition and the rapidly changing technology. Observations as well as previous studies like Bacal (2000) have shown that no matter whether a change is of major proportions or is objectively small, the change manager must anticipate that people in the organization will find reasons to resist change. This research was conducted through a case study of the University of Nairobi whose objectives were three fold . These were to establish the nature of resistance to change implementation in the University, to establish how the University managed the resistance and finally to determine how effective the approaches in managing resistance to change have been . To assist the researcher gather the data , a questionnaire guide was used that covered the nature and causes of resistance and how the resistance was managed.