A New Approach for the Analysis of Resistance to Change in the Digital Transformation Context

In a context marked by the rapid evolution of technologies and the omnipresence of IT at the heart of all activities, the digital transformation of companies is no longer a luxury but an absolute necessity. This technological transformation can lead to resistance from the employees affected by the change. In order to properly conduct the change management process, it is necessary to ensure the involvement of employees from the beginning of this process, which is composed of three phases: the change management strategy, the diagnosis, and the actions implementation. This paper focuses on the diagnostic phase and more specifically on the evaluation stage. This evaluation measures the employees’ hesitation to express their degree of resistance toward the digital initiatives launched in the company. However, this assessment is usually done subjectively, and employees express their hesitation in non-uniform manners. In this work, we propose a weighted generalized hesitating fuzzy approach based on the fusion of theoretical concepts of generalized hesitant fuzzy sets and formal concept analysis (FCA), to formalize the measurement of degree hesitation in change resistance. This approach is flexible and allows the top management of each organizational unit to correctly measure the resistance to change of their teams and then evaluate that measure at the global organizational level.