Difficult employees who resist change are often the most rational thinkers in the office, while the team players are usually just ignoring the risks.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
Resistance as Rational Evaluation: A Behavioral Mis-Specification
SSRN · 6635439
The Takeaway
Corporate management typically views employee pushback as an emotional failure or a lack of flexibility. Analysis of organizational behavior suggests that resistance is actually a high-value signal indicating that a proposed change is logically flawed. Workers who question new policies are often using their deep institutional knowledge to identify problems that leadership has overlooked. When companies silence these difficult voices, they lose their best evaluative thinkers and increase the likelihood of a project failing. The employees who adapt the fastest are often the ones who are the least invested in the long-term success of the company.
From the abstract
Despite decades of refinement, organizational change frameworks continue to misinterpret resistance as a behavioral or attitudinal failure rather than as rational evaluation under constraint. This paper interrogates the behavioral assumptions underlying this misdiagnosis. Grounded in Jensen and Meckling's Resourceful, Evaluative, Maximizing Model (REMM) as an economic baseline of agency, the analysis treats change as an illustrative domain rather than the object of theory construction. Resistanc