Overcoming Resistance to Change and Enhancing Creative Performance

Drawing on the sense-making perspective, the authors develop and test a cross-level model of individual creativity, integrating resistance to change and three human resource contextual factors to moderate the individual relationship. This cross-level study of working adults from a wide array of Chinese companies addresses one of the major challenges managers face in enhancing individual-level creativity: overcoming employees’ resistance to change. The authors study the efficacy of three contextual factors that are important elements of the creative process—modernity climate, leadership style, and coworker characteristics—for helping managers overcome this challenge. The authors find that the three contextual variables moderate the negative relationship between resistance to change and creativity, and the pattern of results indicates that managing human resources practices may mitigate the detrimental effects of resistance to change on creativity.