A majority of all grievances presented at Harwood have always stemmed from a change situation. - John R. P. French

From the point of view of factory management, there were two purposes to the research: (1) Why do people resist change so strongly? and (2) What can be done to overcome this resistance?

Accordingly one finds in political science, in sociology, and in social psychology a variety of distinctions among different types of social power or among qualitatively different processes of social influence... Our main purpose is to identify the major types of power and to define them systematically so that we may compare them according to the changes which they produce and the other effects which accompany the use of power.

This is a report of an actual industrial experiment designed to determine why workers resisted job changes and what could be done about the problem. The research arose out of the need to change industrial operations to meet competitive conditions and was instituted after earlier incentives and propaganda procedures had proved ineffectual.