One of the most challenging obstacles for an employee to try to overcome is organizational change. Change management process comes in many different ways. The employee may have to adjust to new rules, new managements, new location etc. A tenure employee may refuse to break old habits and adjust to new set of guidelines. All of these culture change can and will create conflict in any work environment. Furthermore, our age plays a major role, according to an article by Jennifer Mclynch, “Managing Change in the Workplace” published in 2007. She stated, “The older we get the more we appreciate predictability in our lives. We like to know that we will show up at work and see the same people, work at the same station, and perform a function that is familiar to us.” She went on to say that changes remove the predictability most of us are used to and because of that we encounter a great deal of distress.

As a manager you must always be ready to not only accept change management process, but also to be prepared to deal with the emotional states some of your employees maybe in. Organizational changes usually means something that was very familiar has come to an end and will be replace by some unknown. This causes the employee to become very emotional. The employee perceptions are alter, and they believe they have lost something and also thinks its personal instead of realizing this just a business decision that was made.

As a manager you need to be prepared for employees and be ready to demonstrate a wide range of emotional skills to get the organizational change fully implemented. Some of the emotions you will have to deal with are: Anger, sometimes others who does not favor the change management process will do everything in their power to sabotage the organizational change. You will also find some of the employees are in the Denial stage, at times employees will attempt to strike a deal to have the change delay or something different in order to convince the employer to go back to the old ways. Furthermore, you will uncover anxiety or sadness which will result in many call outs, remarks about being stressed out and some times just plain silence.

With these wide ranges of emotions, a manager has to remain calm, open to listen without being defensive, critical or angry. The manager has to continue to reaffirm the reason for the change. One the most important thing a manager can do is to openly acknowledge the employees feelings. Do not pretend you don’t see and do not guess at what you think the employee is feeling. You have to set the right examples. Even if you are not happy with the change do not exhibit anger, frustrations in front of the employees. You will only increase their already pessimistic view of the organizational change. It is your role to play a counselor to all my employees.

Besides company changes that caused conflicts, power struggles also play an important role in creating team conflict. There is competitiveness and no cohesiveness when one has power over someone. And if the person with the power has allowed the increase authority to go to their head, the employee they are in charge of will eventually go against any of the managers delegations of tasks, thus creating more conflicts.

Any kind of change is one of the most challenging event a person has to adapt to. If you resist change, you will have a very challenging life. You may even end up suffering from many of today's sicknesses such as: depression, high blood pressure, anxiety attack etc. I challenge you to welcome change in your life. I promise your life will be more viable and prosperous than if you continue to resist culture change.