The Influence Of Middle Managers’ Involving In Strategic Change Decisions On Performance

Strategic change has been the focus of both academia and business. Strategic change is related to the survival and development of enterprises, and thus many domestic and foreign scholars have launched a lot of research, and achieved fruitful results. However, for a long time, scholars tend to focus more on senior managers and insist that strategic decision-making is the responsibility of senior managers. In fact, with the increasing development of economic globalization, enterprises are facing an increasing number of knowledge workers, an increasingly flat organizational structure, and enterprise management skills of middle managers are increasingly improved, whose demand for realization of self-worth is increasing. Therefore, strategic change scholars begin to move the focus from senior managers to middle managers and maintain that middle managers should also participate in strategic change decision-making. But research about the relationship between middle managers’involving in strategic change decisions and performance is rare, which gives priority to qualitative analysis such as case study. Whether middle managers involving in strategic change decisions can have an impact on performance is still blind in this field.Based on this, this paper builds the conceptual model of middle managers involving in strategic change decisions affecting performance on the basis of the literature review, and validates it by demonstration data. This paper is divided into four main parts:firstly, this paper analyzes and summarizes the research of strategic change, including the content and classification of strategic change, strategic change based on cognitive research perspective, middle managers involving in strategic change decisions and the relationship between strategic change and performance; secondly, building the conceptual model by literature review and theoretical deduction; thirdly, selecting the most suitable scale according to previous studies and designing the questionnaire for this study; finally, testing the conceptual model by analyzing the data obtained from empirical investigation.The survey carries out middle managers of enterprises which have experienced strategic change as subjects, and216questionnaires are recovered. Then, taking advantage of exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis and other statistical methods, our proposed research model and hypotheses can be tested based on data analysis of the results. Main conclusions are as follows:Middle managers involving in strategic change decision has a significant positively influence on both short-term performance and long-term performance; Middle managers’basic interpretation of positioning differences in strategic change decisions plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between the middle managers involving in strategic change decisions and performance. Middle managers’basic interpretation of conception differences in strategic change decisions plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between the middle managers involving in strategic change decisions and the short-term performance, but not obvious between the middle managers involving in strategic change decisions and the long-term performance.