Institutional approaches to overcoming employee resistance to organizational change

The paper deals with a very topical subject, namely overcoming employee resistance to the implementation of innovative organizational and technical changes. One of the points made by the author captures the essence of personnel resistance - labor opportunism, which consists of employees using coworkers or the organization in general for their own personal benefit. In this paper the author introduces the definition of labor opportunism. Previously, labor opportunism was only considered in the context of politics and institutional economics. The paper presents evidence-based arguments for using the phenomenon of labor opportunism to explain the causes of personnel resistance during the implementation of changes. As long as institutional economics offers an extensive body of research related to overcoming opportunism in transaction procedures, the author proposes to use institutional approaches to resolve problems caused by labor opportunism. Labor relations are determined as the object, to which the institutional approaches should be applied. The author outlines the methodological foundations for the institutionalization of labor relationships in an organization. The first stage is meant for identifying the established institutions of labor relations. The second stage should be aimed at determining the current labor relations structure in order to clarify which constituents of the institutions are procedural rules (norms) and which are implicit rules. At the third stage, it is recommended to develop a system of measures and provisions for further development as well as designing the standards that can streamline the organization's labor relations towards creating conditions, favorable for the cooperation of employees with change implementation agents - that is to say, standards that would minimize labor opportunism. Obviously, each of the three stages outlined in the proposed method for institutionalizing labor relations should have specific content determined by the structure of the existing institutions and the content of the introduced changes. Thus, it is proposed to institutionalize labor relations in enterprises in order to eradicate labor opportunism during the implementation of innovative changes. During the transition of Russian economy to the principles of an innovation-based economy, addressing such problems is definitely extremely important and relevant.

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