MGMT 8920M Week 5 Synthesis Draft Example

What Middle Managers Did With Strategy, and How Rarely Anyone Watched: A Synthesis Draft Linking Three Themes, Implementation, Interpretation and Issue Selling, So That Each Ends Where the Next Begins and the Pattern Across Them Points to a Study Observing Interpretation as It Happens

Student Name

Walden University

MGMT 8920M: Developing the Content Literature Review and Research Method and Design

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What Middle Managers Did With Strategy, and How Rarely Anyone Watched: A Synthesis Draft Linking Three Themes, Implementation, Interpretation and Issue Selling, So That Each Ends Where the Next Begins and the Pattern Across Them Points to a Study Observing Interpretation as It Happens

Middle Managers as Implementers

Early research on middle managers and strategy treated them as the people who carry out plans made above them. In this view the important question was whether middle managers would implement strategy faithfully, and the main threat was their self-interest. Guth and MacMillan (1986) applied expectancy theory to the problem and reported evidence that middle managers who believed a strategy compromised their own interests could redirect it, delay it or reduce its quality. Their contribution was to show that implementation was not automatic, and that the managers in the middle had both motive and means to change what strategy became.

The implementation view has a long reach. Even the typology that Floyd and Wooldridge (1992) developed, which identified several distinct roles for middle managers in strategy, retained implementing deliberate strategy as one of them, and their survey of 259 middle managers in 25 organizations measured how much each role was performed. Yet in this body of work, middle managers were mostly asked whether and how much they carried out strategy. The research rarely asked what managers made of the plans they received, which is where the second theme begins.

Middle Managers as Interpreters

The second theme starts from that question. Studies of sensemaking treat middle managers as people who must work out what a strategy means for their own units before they can act on it. Balogun and Johnson (2004), in a longitudinal qualitative study of an organization restructuring from a hierarchy into decentralized units, found that middle managers developed new understandings of the change largely through conversations with one another, in the absence of senior managers. Their study is notable for its method: it followed managers through the change, using diaries and repeated meetings, rather than asking them about it afterward.

Rouleau (2005) studied middle managers at a clothing company implementing a strategic change, and identified the everyday practices through which they interpreted the change and conveyed it to clients, among them translating the strategy's orientation into terms customers would recognize. Her analysis drew on the routines and conversations of managers at work. Wooldridge et al. (2008), reviewing twenty-five years of middle management research, observed that the field had grown diverse in its constructs and that its findings had accumulated unevenly, a judgment that applies especially to this theme, where a few rich studies stand beside many interview-based accounts.

Taken as a whole, then, interpretation has been studied mostly after the fact. Balogun and Johnson (2004) and Rouleau (2005) are exceptions, and their findings are among the most cited in the theme because they observed interpretation as it happened. Most studies in this theme ask managers to recall how they understood a change, which makes interpretation look more settled and more individual than those two studies found it to be.

Middle Managers as Issue Sellers

The third theme turns the direction of influence around. Instead of interpreting what comes down, middle managers sell issues upward, trying to direct top managers' attention to problems and opportunities they see. Dutton and Ashford (1993) developed issue selling as a framework, arguing that top management's attention is scarce and that how issues are packaged and presented shapes which ones it receives. Later empirical work examined how managers decide whether to sell an issue at all. Dutton et al. (2002), studying women managers considering whether to raise gender-equity issues, found that the perceived exclusiveness of an organization's culture was the cue that most affected their willingness to sell such an issue.

This theme, too, relies largely on recollection and on hypothetical choices. The first study in Dutton et al. (2002) asked managers to describe cues they had attended to in the past, and the second used an experiment in which participants responded to described contexts. Both methods are well suited to identifying what managers say they consider. Neither shows issue selling as it unfolds in a meeting or a sequence of conversations, where an issue's framing may change in response to how it is received.

The Pattern Across the Three Themes

Read together, the three themes form a sequence. The first asked whether middle managers would carry out strategy, and left aside what they made of it. The second asked what they made of it, and studied that mostly through recollection, with two notable exceptions. The third asked how they push issues upward, and again relied on managers' accounts of past attempts and on responses to described situations.

The pattern across all three is a mismatch between the field's questions and its methods. The questions concern processes that happen over time and in interaction: implementing, interpreting, selling. The methods, with a few exceptions, capture managers' later accounts of those processes. The exceptions are revealing. The studies that watched interpretation as it happened, by following managers through a change, found it more social and more provisional than recall-based studies suggest.

What Observation Would Add

Observation would not replace interviews; it would change what interviews are asked to do. A researcher who has watched a unit meeting in which a new strategy was first discussed can ask the managers present what they made of particular moments, rather than asking them to reconstruct the whole process from memory. Recollection tends to tidy a process, giving it a clearer sequence and a more individual author than it had. Observation captures the provisional versions of an interpretation, the ones that were tried in conversation and dropped, which recollection rarely preserves. The two exceptions in the second theme suggest how much this matters: both found interpretation to be shaped by conversations among peers, a finding that interview-only studies would be poorly placed to make.

Conclusion of the Argument

The field has studied what middle managers did with strategy, but it has seldom watched them doing it. That is where a study can contribute: by observing middle managers interpreting a strategic change as it happens, through repeated observation of meetings and conversations over the months in which the change is introduced. Such a study would extend the small number of observational studies in the second theme and test whether their findings hold in another setting, rather than adding one more account based on recollection.

References

Balogun, J., & Johnson, G. (2004). Organizational restructuring and middle manager sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal, 47(4), 523-549. https://doi.org/10.2307/20159600

Dutton, J. E., & Ashford, S. J. (1993). Selling issues to top management. Academy of Management Review, 18(3), 397-428. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1993.9309035145

Dutton, J. E., Ashford, S. J., Lawrence, K. A., & Miner-Rubino, K. (2002). Red light, green light: Making sense of the organizational context for issue selling. Organization Science, 13(4), 355-369. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.4.355.2949

Floyd, S. W., & Wooldridge, B. (1992). Middle management involvement in strategy and its association with strategic type: A research note. Strategic Management Journal, 13(S1), 153-167. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250131012

Guth, W. D., & MacMillan, I. C. (1986). Strategy implementation versus middle management self-interest. Strategic Management Journal, 7(4), 313-327. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250070403

Rouleau, L. (2005). Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day. Journal of Management Studies, 42(7), 1413-1441. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2005.00549.x

Wooldridge, B., Schmid, T., & Floyd, S. W. (2008). The middle management perspective on strategy process: Contributions, synthesis, and future research. Journal of Management, 34(6), 1190-1221. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206308324326