Resistance to Change: Unraveling the Roles of Change Strategists, Agents, and Recipients.

This article systematically reviews organizational research on resistance to change (RTC), focusing on the distinct and interactive roles of change strategists, agents, and recipients in shaping resistance within organizations. It proposes an integrative framework that categorizes RTC dynamics across four levels of analysis—organizational, meso, group/interpersonal, and individual—highlighting how resistance manifests cognitively, affectively, and behaviorally in various forms. The review identifies established themes, such as dispositional resistance among recipients and strategists' framing of change, while emphasizing emerging perspectives on dynamic role shifts and co-construction of change through interactions among participants. It also discusses empirical challenges in measuring and studying RTC and suggests future research directions involving big data, advanced analytics, and nuanced conceptualizations to better understand the complex, multilevel nature of resistance in organizational change processes.