Heroes or Villains? Recasting Middle Management Roles, Processes, and Behaviours

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Abstract

Middle management ranks are once again being questioned by scholars and practitioners alike. This introduction to the special issue represents a timely reference point for consolidating, reviving, and guiding the next wave of researchers seeking to engage this debate. We review the foundations and recent advances in middle management research and develop an organizing framework in terms of middle management's organizational roles, coordination processes, and agentic behaviours. We also identify how new ways of organizing, technology, and middle manager needs are changing to shape each of these themes. The collection of works we synthesize in this introduction offer theoretical advances and empirical evidence on how these changes affect middle management roles, processes, and behaviours. We conclude by mapping out promising research avenues for future research in middle management.

Middle Managers’ Struggle Over Their Subject Position in Open Strategy Processes

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Abstract 

In this paper we examine middle managers’ struggle over their subject position as strategists in the context of participative strategy processes. Based on a longitudinal case study of a company undertaking an Open Strategy process, we show how the wider inclusion of front-line employees in developing new strategy undermines the traditional subject position of middle managers. Based on these findings, we develop a process model depicting the recursive dynamics of middle managers’ struggles to maintain their subject positions in the face of employee participation. With these findings we contribute to the literature on middle managers by advancing our understanding of the implications of employee participation for middle managers’ subject position as strategists and their different ways of reclaiming their subject position. We also contribute to the literature on Open Strategy by revealing the implications for traditional strategy actors as well as by explaining the processual dynamics of participation over time.

An Integrative Model of the Role of Structural, Behavioural, and Cognitive Coordination in Intergroup Effectiveness: How Middle Managers Play a Role

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Abstract

Coordinating interdependent teams' effective performance of joint tasks presents serious challenges to organizations and their middle managers. But an integrative theoretical understanding of how to coordinate such intergroup effectiveness and what role middle managers play is missing. Consolidating three separate literatures, we develop an integrative framework of the role of and interactions between structural, behavioural, and cognitive coordination in intergroup effectiveness. We propose that behavioural coordination through middle manager boundary spanning and cognitive coordination through intergroup strategic consensus (shared understanding of strategy between teams) can substitute for structural coordination (i.e., when teams do not share division membership). Moreover, we hypothesize that behavioural coordination and cognitive coordination strengthen each other in improving intergroup effectiveness. Multisource data on 188 intergroup dyads support our predictions. Our integrative framework elucidates how these coordination mechanisms combine in driving intergroup effectiveness and suggests that middle managers and their boundary spanning have a critical role in modern team-based organizations.

Walling in and Walling out: Middle Managers’ Boundary Work

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Literature around middle management has highlighted the importance of intra-organizational boundaries, focusing on the in-betweenness and fluidity of middle-managerial roles and practices. Yet, this literature has largely focused on the crossing of largely stable, monolithic boundaries, placing less emphasis on the plurality of emerging boundaries and the ways in which they are constructed. Focusing on boundaries as the outcomes of, rather than only as constraints upon, everyday practices, we conduct an ethnographic study across multiple sites of a Brazilian audit firm, examining middle managers' construction, maintenance and adjustment of boundaries. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldnotes and 155 formal interviews, our study reveals how middle managers fluidly manipulate boundaries' visibility and permeability to achieve specific purposes, and how different configurations of these elements generate various boundary work practices, which we describe as barricade, façade, taboo and phantom boundary work. Moreover, we show the dual orientation of middle managers' boundary work – both obstructing and facilitating boundary-crossing – demonstrating that, in contrast to prior research, both orientations can be enacted by the same actor according to his or her purposes. By doing so, we contribute to scholarship exploring agency and plasticity as the key issues linking the existing literature on middle management with that on boundary work.

Kiss‐Up‐Kick‐Down to Get Ahead: A Resource Perspective on How, When, Why, and With Whom Middle Managers Use Ingratiatory and Exploitative Behaviours to Advance Their Careers

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Abstract

There are myriad organizational anecdotes about middle managers who advance their careers by ingratiating themselves with their superiors while exploiting and abusing their subordinates. We formally define this behavioural combination as the Kiss-Up-Kick-Down (KUKD) phenomenon and develop a resource-focused framework that not only explains when middle managers will engage in KUKD, but also how such behaviour helps their career progression via three resource-related pathways: One path involving sponsorship resource gains from superiors, another path involving productive resource gains from subordinates, and an intra-individual path related to middle managers' own psychological resources. Staying within the resource framework, we theorize that superiors and subordinates become likely targets of KUKD when the former is resource-poor and the latter is resource-rich. Finally, we deliberate on the role of time as a crucial boundary condition: not only in terms of when middle managers engage in KUKD behaviours, but also how such actions involve diminishing returns.

Selecting Innovation Projects: Do Middle and Senior Managers Differ When It Comes to Radical Innovation?

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Drawing on the attention-based view, we theorize about the differences in middle and senior managers' choices to pursue innovation projects. We test our hypotheses in an experimental study examining the decision-making processes of 180 senior and middle managers in selecting, or not, 2880 innovation projects. We find that managers differ in how they select innovation projects in general, and this difference becomes even more salient when such selections involve radical innovation. Specifically, when considering a radical innovation project, middle managers place more value on innovation characteristics required to complete the project, such as social capital and internal knowledge resources. In comparison, senior managers are concerned only with external knowledge resources, which can benefit radical innovation. Our study highlights the need to understand the role of middle managers, who frequently lead the implementation of innovation projects, and provides a theoretical underpinning for the differences in middle and senior managers' decision-making.

Opportunity or Threat? Exploring Middle Manager Roles in the Face of Digital Transformation

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With the proliferation of automation technology, controversy concerning the impact of digital automation on middle-managers’ strategic importance is rising. Some scholars adopt an ‘automation-as-a-threat’ view to argue that digital automation replaces middle-managers’ strategic value. On the contrary, others take an ‘automation-as-an-opportunity’ view to underscore the role accumulation advantages digital automation offers for individuals in organizations. We acknowledge this debate and develop a contingency-based role-theoretical framework, suggesting that the impact of automation on middle-managers’ strategic involvement depends on: (a) the nature of the middle-management tasks subject to automation, and (b) the level of the individual middle-manager's task-related expertise and simultaneous role embeddedness – as defined by their position tenure. We test our framework using longitudinal survey data from German, Swiss and Austrian firms at four time points. Overall, our work takes an important step toward unravelling the complex and contingent impact of digital automation on middle-managers’ strategic involvement in contemporary organizations.