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• Teaching Plan | HBS Case Collection | 2013

  Fonterra (TP)

  David E. Bell, Mary Shelman and Annelena Lobb

  Citation:

  Bell, David E., Mary Shelman, and Annelena Lobb. "Fonterra (TP)." Harvard Business School Teaching Plan 513-024, April 2013.

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013 (Revised from original 2012 version)

  Paul Thomson: Walker Insurance

  Michael Roberts, Jim Sharpe and Sonia Nagala Change

  Having just acquired Walker Insurance, Paul Thomson finds himself short of funds to support his original turnaround plan. He can request additional cash from his investor group, hunker down and grow at a slower rate or consider a proposal to buy his business. He has taken steps to re-virtualize the company and is challenged to build a salesforce to grow the business.

  Keywords: crisis management; Acquisitions; Search Funds; entrepreneurial management; entrepreneurs; entrepreneurship; Insurance; turnarounds; boards of directors; sales force management; Entrepreneurship; Insurance Industry; Florida;

  Citation:

  Roberts, Michael, Jim Sharpe, and Sonia Nagala Change. "Paul Thomson: Walker Insurance." Harvard Business School Case 813-057, April 2013. (Revised from original August 2012 version.)

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• Article | Management Science | April, 2013

  Overcoming Resistance to Organizational Change: Strong Ties and Affective Cooptation

  Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro

  We propose a relational theory of how change agents in organizations use the strength of ties in their network to overcome resistance to change. We argue that strong ties to potentially influential organization members who are ambivalent about a change (fence-sitters) provide the change agent with an affective basis to coopt them. This cooptation increases the probability that the organization will adopt the change. By contrast, strong ties to potentially influential organization members who disapprove of a change outright (resistors) are an effective means of affective cooptation only when a change diverges little from institutionalized practices. With more divergent changes, the advantages of strong ties to resistors accruing to the change agent are weaker, and may turn into liabilities that reduce the likelihood of change adoption. Analyses of longitudinal data from 68 multi-method case studies of organizational change initiatives conducted at the National Health Service in the United Kingdom support these predictions and advance a relational view of organizational change in which social networks operate as tools of political influence through affective mechanisms.

  Citation:

  Battilana, Julie, and Tiziana Casciaro. "Overcoming Resistance to Organizational Change: Strong Ties and Affective Cooptation." Management Science 59, no. 4 (April, 2013): 819–836.

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