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

  OrganJet and GuardianWings

  Julie Battilana and James Weber

  Citation:

  Battilana, Julie, and James Weber. "OrganJet and GuardianWings." Harvard Business School Case 413-068, April 2013. (Revised from original February 2013 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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• Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | 2013

  Automating the Paris Subway (TN) (A) & (B)

  Michel Anteby and Ayn Cavicchi

  In 2001, the head of the Paris Subway reflected on how to transform Line 1 into a driverless line without triggering a social conflict. After the shock of the 2000 Notre Dame de Lorette subway accident, in which a train derailed and caused 25 injuries in a Paris subway station, the state-owned Paris subway operator Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP) decided to adopt new security measures and considered the opportunity to automate the oldest and the busiest line of the network. The Head of the Paris Subway, Serge Lagrange, believed that automating Line 1 would improve security as well as performance. However, the automation would bring about the downsizing of 219 drivers' positions. Lagrange had to figure out how to get the RATP employees on board, particularly drivers and trade unions. How could he convince them of the necessity to automate Line 1? How could he prevent the potentially major social conflict that might result from downsizing the drivers' positions?

  Keywords: Labor relations; Unions; organizational behavior; Change; Transportation Industry; France;

  Citation:

  Anteby, Michel, and Ayn Cavicchi. "Automating the Paris Subway (TN) (A) & (B)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 413-093, March 2013.

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