Dinosaurs or dynamos? Recognizing middle management's strategic role

TLDR

Reengineering and delayering have automated and eliminated middle managers, erasing their strategic benefits. The article aims to show that specific middle‑management behaviors are essential for building organizational capability. The authors describe a learning process where middle managers interpret the environment, spot opportunities, focus resources, and build new assets. The study identifies a middle‑management role encompassing these elements and finds a strong link to performance, concluding that rethinking this role is essential and offering guidance to foster strategic behavior.

Abstract

Executive Overview Reengineering has automated and obliterated middle management, and has diminished their number dramatically. What have also been lost in many delayering efforts, however, are the benefits of the strategic roles of middle managers. This article describes how certain middle management behavior is crucial to developing organizational capability. This is a learning process which calls on organizations to interpret the world, uncover new market opportunities, focus existing resources, and accumulate new resources. In our research, we identified a middle management role with each of these elements, and uncovered a strong relationship between the roles and organizational performance. Therefore, rethinking middle management's strategic role is a necessary part of the delayering process, the article closes by illustrating how to encourage strategic behavior in the reengineered organization.