LEADING AND INSPIRING PEOPLE

Leading and Inspiring People

Leading and Inspiring People

The Middle manager

In the hierarchy of an organization's structure, middle managers reside below the small group of top strategic executives and above front line workers. Middle managers supervise front line staff. They are accountable for their own performance and the performance of the employees reporting to them. They are familiar with the internal and external contexts of the organization's functions and can evaluate new information in the context of their organization's strategy, operations, and markets (Balnaves, 2001, pp. 109-127).

While the middle manager assumes responsibility for the day-to-day transmission and integration of the organization's culture to front line staff, there is agreement in the literature when an organization starts up, the organizational leader sets the cultural agenda. Middle managers exert downward influence by synthesizing, transmitting, interpreting, integrating, evaluating information Embertson (2006) and then passing it on. Through a process of cultural change, symbol construction, and value adjustments, the middle manager creates legitimacy for upper management demands (Clugston, 2000, pp.5-30).

Firms and government invests in human capital differently. The government in general prefers programs, job training or education, while firms in higher degree invest through on-the-job training. Bartlett and Ghoshal (1993) express that improved personnel management and implements of technologies and the like can reduce costs, make the production more efficient and increase the measured productivity. Delmestri and Walgenbach (2005) illustrate that despite this fundamental statements have middle managers earlier when a top-down approach was more usual, faced difficulties. Senior managers who used this approach often viewed middle managers as barriers for future success, instead of a resource.

Evolution of Middle Management

As organizations adapted to changing environments, re-structuring reduced the number of management layers in the middle. Larger and more complex leadership tasks moved deeper into the organization, increasing the leadership span of control. Middle management roles became more challenging and complex. Middle managers had to gain workforce commitment where mutual loyalty was no longer an organizational value and where there was a demand to produce more with fewer resources (Wooldridge, 2008, pp.1190-221). Middle managers became responsible for internal and external relationships, and in the most successful organizations, middle managers had to integrate individual knowledge and skill with organizational knowledge and skill. The difficulty was that middle managers promoted into middle management roles as reward for technical competence, productivity, and dedication and had minimal leadership experience.

Skill and Perspective

Middle managers possessed requisite skills, yet needed to learn to use the skills differently. Even the way in which middle managers interacted required new skills and altered perspectives. Flatter organizations were extending middle management responsibility beyond functional expertise, requiring that middle managers learn to operate from a personal rather than positional power base (Wu, 2010, pp. 90-106). Decision-making in ambiguous situations is a skill for which middle managers had minimal reference; yet increased responsibility for business policy and relationships demanded the skill development. The amount of information available required that middle managers knew how to extract information that was ...