Satyadi Kusumandaru

Leading Change Management Article Review: Understanding the Kubler Ross Model

Kubler Ross Model is a method to understand change process and how people will respond about it. This
model is developed by Swiss psychiatric Elisabeth Kubler Ross. According to her, there are five popular
stages of grief, popularly called DABDA – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

The first stage of Grief toward change process is Denial. People will deny a new change because they are
already in their comfort zone. Once change or non-convenience change occurred, people tend to deny
with the fact. For example, when a company suddenly appointed a new CEO to replace their
“employee’s favorite CEO”, then denial among employees regarding this fact may occur.

Anger is a next stage of grief. Sometimes people may think they are in a not fair situation, because of the
event they don’t expect come from out of their range of power.

After angry expressions have been released, then we might calm down. Then we start bargaining, and
conditional sentence like “I would do this if you do that” may appear. Bargaining situation can be
happened with the one who has greater power. An effort to keep maintaining the Status Quo, and
compromise to lengthen the change process happened.

Depression is coming when a Pro Status Quo failed to defend their interest. They are start demotivated.
In a company, this usually happened to the senior employees. For those like HR Manager or line
Manager, they need to be more empathetic to those change resistant.

In the end, Acceptance must be happened because it is now become unavoidable. Therefore, employee
will start focus on a new change. Then the Management need to give some time and understanding to
the employees to adapt with the change.

These DABDA stages are tiring however this is effective because it involves habit, soft approach which
will stick deeper into employee’s heart and mind in responding to changes, compared to a directive and
hard approach.