Universal precautions: employee resistance and strategies for planned organizational change

Health care organizations have been strongly encouraged to design and implement procedures to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS in the workplace. The procedures will have a dramatic impact on the work habits of health care workers and may even challenge some dominant health care values. Therefore, precautionary procedures are likely to meet with mixed reactions and, perhaps, outright resistance from health care workers. This article identifies some plausible causes for employee resistance to precautionary procedures. After describing the dilemma in terms of competing values and conflicting objectives, some practical managerial strategies for reconciling differences and securing broad-based commitment to preventive policies and procedures are proposed.