It's unlikely to be coercion as the QUESTION NO : tells us it's a soft approach.

Facilitation suggests helping the employees along quite a bit to accept the change.

Participation suggests employees will have some say in decision-making.

And the QUESTION NO : speaks of 'increasing understanding' - it's 'Education'.

Kotter and Schlesinger's work here follows a relatively common approach to the thinking in man-agement literature about Change - a continuum from real soft gentle 'this is what we're thinking' through to 'do this or else' with a metaphorical baton in management's hand.