Dealing with the downsides of new work: The reactions of middle managers to the decline in middle management

Abstract

When an organization implements practices within the context of new work, individual actors must translate and adapt them to their local context. These change agents thereby often encounter the paradox of being both translators and targets of change. However, how they react to such a situation, which strategies they use, and whether their reactions legitimize the implementation of new work attempts in their organization have hardly been considered so far. We filled this gap by studying middle managers translating organizational change toward more self-managing structures and other procedures that empower employees. At the same time, however, these changes make the institution of middle management redundant. Findings of a qualitative 32-month single-case study at a medium-sized firm showed that middle managers reacted with five distinct reactions. Informed by translation and institutional theory, we showed that middle managers’ intraorganizational social positions determined their reactions over time, making them either victims or phoenixes of the change process toward new forms of work. Our findings contribute to contemporary research on the implementation of self-managing organizations and help to better understand how such concepts are translated within an organization.