When an enterprise system is implemented employees often respond with user resistance behavior. As employees’ work environment are changed significantly they also experience stress during an implementation. However, neither technostress nor user resistance research have focused on the stress related to the change induced by an enterprise system implementation. Hence, it is not known how change-related stress results in user resistance behavior and thus prevents organizations from managing the implementation process sufficiently. Therefore, we provide a research model that theorizes the influence of change characteristics, such as change complexity, switching costs and switching benefits, on change-related work overload and role ambiguity as change stressors, which in turn determines employees change-induced exhaustion. When this exhaustion is perceived as a threat user resistance behavior will occur. Using a longitudinal field study with 273 employees during an enterprise system implementation we provide empirical evidence for the proposed model.