Abstract

The purpose of this study is to fill the gap of understanding hospital staffs’ perceptions towards change, caused by introducing an information system into one of the hospital’s daily processes. It also aims at understanding reasons behind resistance to change while finding appropriate intervention strategies to deal with and minimize observed resistance to change from an information system. This contributes to the body of knowledge regarding change resistance to information systems in public South African hospitals. The case study research strategy was combined with an inductive approach. Fourteen interviews (7 medical doctors and 7 ward clerks) were conducted and thematically analysed resulting in a change resistance conceptual model. The generated conceptual model asserts that five main factors contribute to change resistance: unclearly defined duties; fear of job security and technology usage; years of service; resource availability and resource mismatch; as well as insufficient training resulting from the lack of a learning culture. The conceptual model can be used as a basis to conduct a root-cause analysis regarding successfully introducing change into a public hospital. Change agents should aim to understand the status quo of the organization and find ways of incorporating that into the change process.

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