A Quantitative Study of Mitigating Resistance to Change through a Neuro Linguistic Approach: With the Use of Narratives and a Neuro Linguistic Pattern

Resistance to organizational change by employees and management delays implementation, creates emotional stress for both, and reduces the potential savings from rapid change implementation. The delay comes from organizational members’ beliefs stuck in the status quo thus reducing the change’s potential improvement in productivity and effectiveness. If beliefs about the change could be embraced creating organizational readiness, these negative effects could be mitigated and improvements in productivity could be realized sooner. Reducing the resistance to organizational change through the use of metaphors and a specific neuro linguistic programming pattern (NLP) is the focus of this research study. NLP was originally developed in the 1970’s at the University of California Santa Cruz to create rapid change in counseling sessions. Later, new applications of specific neuro linguistic patterns were introduced in the business arena. In the last thirty-five years limited research studies have been conducted regarding NLP. Almost none examine its application to organizational change. Numerous studies have been done regarding narratives’ influence on people’s beliefs in public policy studies. Additionally, metaphors have been studied in the fields of persuasive communication. The hypothesis of this study explores the use of change metaphors (narratives) and the use of a specific neuro linguistic pattern from the neuro linguistic programming (NLP) within a workshop to reduce individual resistance and improve acceptance of an organizational change. The change in the participants’ attitudes of acceptance to the organizational change was measured prior to, immediately following and 4-8 weeks following each workshop. The results of this research show the effects of using NLP metaphors and specific language patterns to change beliefs regarding a proposed organizational change through the use of a quantitative design using the ANOVA methodology