The Psychology of Policy Resistance: Personality Traits and Teacher Responses to School Calendar Reform

Abstract

Large-scale educational reforms are more often defeated at the implementation stage than at the design stage, because the professionals expected to enact them respond to imposed change in systematically different ways. Whether those differences are principally dispositional or principally contextual is a general and unresolved question in the study of policy implementation. This study examines the relationship between teachers' personality traits and resistance to a mandated change in the school calendar, using the transition from a two-semester to a three-semester (trimester) system in Saudi Arabia as an empirical case in which a single reform was imposed simultaneously and uniformly on an entire teaching population. In a cross-sectional correlational survey, 615 primary, middle and secondary school teachers completed the Five Factor Personality Scale and an adapted version of Oreg's (2006) resistance-to-change scale, which distinguishes cognitive, emotional and behavioural resistance. Neuroticism was positively associated with resistance across all three dimensions, whereas extraversion, openness to experience and agreeableness were negatively associated with it; conscientiousness showed no significant association. Female teachers scored significantly higher than male teachers on neuroticism, extraversion and conscientiousness, and secondary school teachers scored higher on extraversion and openness than primary and middle school teachers. Despite these dispositional differences, resistance to the reform differed significantly neither by gender nor by school level. The pattern suggests that although personality shapes how individual teachers experience mandated change, disposition alone does not account for the overall level of resistance a reform encounters; conditions shared across the system appear to exert the stronger influence. Implications are drawn for the sequencing of person-centred and system-level implementation strategies in centralised education systems more generally.