The Role Of Middle-Managers In The Process Of Organizational Change

Organizations nowadays take initiatives of organizational change with the hope to improve the business performance. However, many attempts of organizational change have turned into failures. Research has shown that an important cause of such failed attempts may be related to the resistance from people involved in the change process, who try to defend the status quo. One of the key challenges of any organizational change, therefore, is to minimize the human-related friction during the process. It intuitively makes sense to believe that top executives play a critical championing role while employees tend to treat organizational change in a more passive way. However, contrary to this belief, research findings have pointed out valuable contributions made by middle managers in organizational changes, especially radical ones.Based on the findings and framework proposed by Huy and Balogun and Johnson, this study examines the role played by middle managers during the process of organizational change from a perspective of organizational sense-making. This study is set in a context of a branch of a prestigious multinational corporation in China. As one of the organization's R&D hubs, this branch underwent a major top-down, planned organizational change as a result of the corporate decision to leverage the creativity of several teams of technical employees to a greater extent. As many previous restructuring attempts elsewhere, the change did not take place smoothly. The middle managers, in this case, team leaders, have been found to work as a bridge, a communicator, and an entrepreneur between top management and the developers. To better understand the role played by the middle managers in facilitating the organizational change, the authors apply an anthropological methodology and carefully document and summarize the behaviors of seven team leaders in this branch. The team leaders are interviewed on a weekly basis, their communications with top executives and subordinates are recorded in the format of internal memos, emails, and etc., and their daily behavior will be observed and documented. Based on data collected via on-site observations, interviews, and employee job satisfaction survey, the authors explore the relationship between each team leader's behavioral pattern and desired results of organizational change (enhanced employee job satisfaction and team performance).The purpose of the study is to identify middle manager behavior patterns that are more effective in facilitating organizational change and in delivering better results of the change. This research intends to highlight the importance of middle managers in the process of organizational change, and examines the consequences of the sense-making behavior of the middle managers. In addition, the research findings may shed some light on the managerial practice of change management in organizations.