10.4 Barriers to Engagement

APMG Change Management Foundation Exam

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1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context

1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits

2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context

2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels

3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach

3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators

4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy

4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy

5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response

5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model

6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning

6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership

7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change

8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture

8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate

9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change

9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity

10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement

10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement

11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection

11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds

12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning

12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning

13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity

13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity

14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change

14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance

15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness

15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision

10.4 Barriers to Engagement

Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI

Role overload means workloads overwhelm individuals' capacity, leading to low engagement

Work-role conflicts arise from conflicting demands, often when multiple changes run simultaneously with no clear priorities

Resource inadequacies occur when tasks are made harder by missing or defective equipment, out-of-date information or untrained staff

Job security reflects how secure people feel about their place in the organisation, and confidence in it fosters psychological safety

Sense of fairness concerns perceptions of fair procedures and treatment, and engagement increases with transparency about how decisions are made

Last updated: September 2026

Engagement is "the means by which an organization increases involvement of its employees and other stakeholders with organizational change" (Hodges, 2019). CM3 identifies five specific barriers to engagement and five principles that help build it. Both lists are examinable, and the barriers are examined by scenario — you are given a quoted complaint and asked which barrier it represents.

The five barriers

Barrier Definition

Role overload There is too much work to do in the time available to complete it. Workloads are overwhelming the capacity of individuals to deal with them, leading to low engagement

Work-role conflicts There are conflicting demands from different managers, leaders, colleagues or clients . Competing demands often occur when multiple changes are taking place simultaneously and there are no clear priorities

Resource inadequacies Work tasks are made harder because of problems caused by missing or defective equipment, missing or out-of-date information, lack of properly-trained staff or other key resources

Job security How secure people feel about their places within the organisation. Confidence in job security fosters a sense of psychological safety

Sense of fairness Perceptions of fairness of procedures and how people are treated during change. Engagement increases when there is transparency around how decisions are made and a sense that people are being treated fairly

Distinguishing overload from conflict

This is the distinction the exam tests most, and it is genuinely easy to confuse because both involve too much.

Role overload is a volume problem: too much work for the time available. The person knows what to do; there is simply too much of it.

Work-role conflicts is a priority problem: conflicting demands from different sources, with no clear priorities. The person does not know which work to do.

The diagnostic phrase: "I have so much work to do on multiple changes, I'm not sure what I should be focusing on first" is a work-role conflict . The giveaway is "not sure what I should be focusing on first" — that is a priority conflict, not a volume complaint. A pure overload complaint would be "there simply aren't enough hours to finish this".

The distinction matters practically because the remedies differ entirely. Overload is fixed by reducing work or extending time. Conflict is fixed by someone with authority setting the priority — which is a sponsor and line leader responsibility, and connects to the sponsor's obligation to ensure ongoing alignment with other organisational initiatives.

Each barrier and its remedy

Barrier What removes it

Role overload Reduce scope, extend timescales, backfill capacity, sequence changes rather than running them concurrently

Work-role conflicts Explicit prioritisation from someone with authority across the competing demands; portfolio-level sequencing

Resource inadequacies Fix the equipment, update the information, train the staff — often unglamorous and often the cheapest available engagement win

Job security Say what is known and what is not, as early as possible; where jobs are affected, say so honestly and set out the process

Sense of fairness Transparent criteria, consistent application, and explaining how decisions were made rather than only what was decided

The job security barrier deserves particular note because of its link to psychological safety: confidence in job security fosters a sense of psychological safety . Where job security is genuinely uncertain, silence is the worst option. People assume the worst in an information vacuum, and the assumed threat is usually larger than the real one.

The fairness barrier connects directly to SCARF's fairness domain — how equitably resources, time and attention are being shared — and to the finding that people react strongly to perceived unfairness even when the objective impact on them is small. The remedy is largely procedural: engagement increases with transparency around how decisions are made , which is often achievable even when the decisions themselves cannot be changed.

Principles that help build engagement

Alongside the barriers, CM3 lists five principles for building and maintaining engagement throughout the change:

• Inclusivity — involving the range of stakeholders rather than a convenient subset
• Connectivity — building the connections between people and groups that carry engagement
• Transparency — being open about what is happening, including what is not yet decided
• Dialogue — two-way exchange rather than broadcast
• Empathy — understanding stakeholders from their own point of view

These five are worth reading against the barriers: transparency addresses fairness and job security, dialogue addresses all five by surfacing them early, and empathy is what allows a change manager to recognise a barrier that a stakeholder has not stated directly.

Recognising barriers before they show as resistance

The practical value of this list is that these barriers frequently masquerade as resistance. A team that is not engaging with a change may not disagree with it at all — they may be overloaded, receiving conflicting priorities, lacking the equipment to do it, or anxious about their jobs. Diagnosing which barrier is operating before designing a persuasion intervention is one of the highest-return habits in stakeholder work, because four of the five barriers are removed by practical action rather than by communication.