Many managers say that the reaction to change, either initiated by management or by employees, is difficult to predict. Some employees will resist any change, some will always welcome it, and most employees will be somewhere in the middle.

Moreover, many times a mixed reaction to change can be seen in the same person at the same time. For example, when you ask a worker about his feelings regarding his upcoming promotion, a frequent answer is \\happy and scared\\. Or, in other words, he wants the change and resists it (or at least recoils from it) at the same time.

How can this conflict be explained? In this article Efrat Goldratt would like to suggest a plausible answer to that question. In order to understand the roots of this conflict one must examine what causes willingness to embrace change, what causes resistance to change, and how these contradicting reactions might appear simultaneously.