Search

Platforms for gig work like Uber advertise their job opportunities as “entrepreneurial work” to potential workers and their company as technologically innovative to potential investors. One of the ...

Companies are pushed in looking for more sources of external knowledge as a source of competitive advantage. One of these sources is universities with whose companies engage by performing Open Inno...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted how businesses operate, creating high levels of uncertainty on the part of organizational members. Drawing on social information processing theory a...

Middle manager interactions with frontline employees are a key nexus in strategizing and prone to paradoxical tensions that need to be managed. Based on a 34-month video ethnography, we show the ma...

We introduce the middle echelons concept to the management domain by examining how matching levels of racial diversity in middle management and senior management (i.e., upper echelons) impacts firm...

Today’s environment is one of continuous, complex change, and has been found to be perceived by middle management as excessive (Falkenberg, Stensaker, Meyer, & Haueng, 2005). The goal of this resea...

Strategy implementation (SI) is a critical component of organizational performance. We propose that SI can be conceptualized as a dual-purpose capability; i.e., a capability with operational and dy...

There has been much controversy concerning the effects of automation on the role of middle managers in contemporary organizations. Some scholars adopt the “automation-as-a-threat” perspective to ar...

This symposium showcases recent research projects on how organizations are implementing emerging technologies and how these technologies are changing relationships at work as well as the role of mi...

This practice-theoretical paper explores how the dynamic interface of top management and middle managers (TMT-MM interface) co-constitutes TMT strategizing. Using the notion of strategic concept, o...

Strategic role conflict has been identified in the literature as a hindrance, even an impediment, to effective middle-management involvement in strategy. Despite a growing body of theoretical work ...

Middle managers are embedded within the structure of large organizations, mediating between organizational levels and units. Given their role and position, individual middle managers tend to have v...

This study explores implementation performance that derives from the conjointed manifestation of two different set of practices which middle managers (MMs) use while participating in strategy, name...

Acquired and acquiring middle managers are in a central role in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), as they are responsible for the execution of the acquisition’s strategy. However, the acquisitions al...

Whilst by behaving authentically (i.e. consistently to their beliefs and feelings) middle managers can strengthen relational trust indispensable at time of change, it is precisely at this time that...

Middle managers are recognized for their critical role in strategy implementation, while dynamic capabilities are fundamental to adapt to a changing environment. Considering that dynamic capabiliti...

Adopting a social interactionist perspective, this paper explores how envy emerges and is diffused during the process of innovating in organizations. We propose a model of envy recognition and management that translates the potential harmful effects of envy towards beneficial outcomes for organizational innovation. We theorize around the role of leaders--top and middle managers-- as shapers and implementers of the organizational context respectively. These leaders help structure and coordinate management actions that leverage naturally occurring envy for organizational innovation.

While there exists a vast amount of research on strategy formulation, we know relatively little about how a formulated strategy is translated into results via strategic alignment. Middle managers are often noted as crucial actors in aligning employees to strategic organizational goals, yet their effective behaviors towards this end remain understudied. In response to various calls, this work reviews the available literature on the behaviors of middle managers in the context of strategic alignment of work-floor employees. We adopted a systematic literature review technique, starting with a thorough search with predefined search terms through ABI/Inform Complete and Scopus. The resulting thirteen empirical articles were content-analyzed by two independent raters, leading to a total of 169 behavioral items. Four meta-categories of middle-managerial behaviors were identified that support employee strategic alignment: (1) Direction-oriented behaviors (e.g., monitoring and checking performance); (2) Participation-oriented behaviors (e.g., offering help); (3) Encouragement-oriented behaviors (e.g., getting and giving feedback); and (4) Approachability-oriented behaviors (e.g., showing vulnerability). We present an integrative model of effective middle manager behaviors for employee strategic alignment, which includes, as extra yield, supportive middle managerial personality traits, knowledge and performance areas. Our specific and inclusive model fuels the needed future behavioral and quantitative studies, which can build upon a number of qualitative works that have been published to date, as our review has shown. Understanding exactly which middle managerial behaviors contribute to translating strategy into practice also helps coaches and HR officers in developing managers. This knowledge potentially improves the work lives of many employees.

Instead of exploring the transformation of middle managers’ cognitive schema during strategic change, the paper adopts a relational perspective of sensemaking during strategic change. Based on retr...

Female leaders remain rare despite their representation as degree earners and in middle management. Trainings in more “masculine” styles may also bring more barriers for female leaders. Thus, we ne...

While previous research has highlighted the many benefits of middle management inclusion in strategizing, this paper analyses the flipside of middle management inclusion and how engagement of middl...

This randomized controlled field study explores the relationship of mindfulness to the personal resources of middle managers. Drawing on Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory, we anticipated that min...

Over the past twenty years, organizations have tried to transform themselves from so called inefficient bureaucracies into dynamic, less hierarchical, customer-driven organizations based on employe...

Despite the recognized strategizing role of middle managers in acquisitions, little is known regarding how managers from both acquired and acquiring organizations contribute to strategy adaptation ...

Middle managers are in a unique position to promote the implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) in healthcare organizations, yet knowledge of middle managers’ role remains fractured, span...

Despite the advocation for wider participation in strategy formulation, the literature is still dominated by perspectives that emphasize the importance of top and middle managers. In this paper, we focus on the role and potential of low-power actors that reside outside of management positions and influential departments in open strategy formulation. Building on a unique mixed methods study of an IT- enabled open strategy process deployed in a multinational online payments firm, we examine how low-power actors participate and what impact their participation has on the acceptability of ideas generated. Interestingly, low-power actors were more strategically productive than high-power actors, and ideas were most acceptable among the collective when they were solely produced and co- developed by low-power actors and void of any high-power involvement.

Middle managers have a long legacy in strategy, organizational development, and management research. Uniquely positioned as ‘linking pins’ between strategic and operational interfaces, middle manag...

We investigate whether appointing a middle management level affects startups’ innovation performance. Additional hierarchical levels are often suspected to restrict innovative activities. However, founders’ capacities for information processing and resource allocation are usually strongly limited while, at the same time, R&D decisions are among the most consequential choices of startups. We argue that middle management is positively related to introducing product innovations because it improves the success rates from recombining existing knowledge as well as managing R&D personnel. In addition, we suggest that the effectiveness of these mechanisms depends on the riskiness of a startup’s business opportunity. Based on a sample of German high-tech startups, we find support for our conjectures.

Middle managers, also known as supervisors, have a key integrative function in organizations. They serve as an interface between senior managers and employees and, at the same time, connect their g...

The importance of improving patient safety, particularly through the creation of patient safety cultures in hospitals, has been a critical focus for healthcare organizations since the Institute of ...

The article presents management science research on the 360-degree employee rating process. A middle management program is examined to determine if the 360 process can be sustained on a consistent ...

We report the results of a study that investigates the relationship between middle managers? divergent strategic influence activity, network centrality, and perceptual deviance. Using a social netw...

This article investigates how front line nurse practitioners (NPs) created changes in their work role, and how middle managers took actions to make these changes sustainable in the organizational c...

This study provides a better understanding of how the socially constructed process of strategic renewal emerges from the middle layers in organizations. Using a social network analysis of 95 mid-le...

Although an old concept, the span of control remains elusive. Contradicting mechanisms seem to govern its performance effects, so conclusive evidence is still lacking. Recent research has found tha...

How managers facilitate cross-functional collaboration across intraorganizational symbolic boundaries separating actors has been a seminal and persistent academic puzzle. Whereas these boundaries m...

This paper studies the influence of incentives on resource deployments conducted by central- and local-managers. While resource deployment is usually studied in the context of corporate managers, m...

Academic middle managers incur multiple losses in the performance of their roles which they both draw on and mitigate in their discursive identity work. Based on a sample of UK business school dean...

Management research on gender in leadership has largely focused on issues at the strategic leadership level, showing that an increased female representation can benefit firm performance. However, g...

While often overlooked, middle managers play an important role for organizations. Whether through communication linkages or simply by greasing the wheel of productivity, organizations with properly...

This longitudinal study of mid-career managers compared the career progression of men and women over two periods of time. Unlike the subjects of many earlier studies, these men and women had simila...

Though it has become central in strategic renewal research, the concept of emergent strategic initiative has not received a great deal of theoretical scrutiny. Existing theory combines evolutionary...

In this conceptual paper, we contend that one of the factors that gives rise to the challenges of maintaining a sustainable internal selection environment is the different structural roles that top and middle managers enact in the innovation process. We propose that the extent to which the differences between the structurally differentiated role of top and middle managers could be reconciled harmoniously and integrated is dependent on the organization values embraced by the organization. In particular, we argue that two necessary dimensions are key to sustaining a viable internal selection environment for strategic innovation development: professional identification and perspective taking. We present a model of the interactions between top managers and middle managers in the innovation process, and theorize how a corporate culture that emphasizes both professional identification and perspective taking among employees can lead to behaviors supporting an enactment of a viable internal selection environment ...

This paper studies how middle-level managers deploy resources in the face of internal competition within their firms. Prior research has studied resource management in the context of senior manager...

In the present manuscript, we develop and extend theory with respect to social intrapreneurship by examining the “how” of intrapreneurial championing. More specifically, we integrate the natural-re...