Search results

Mergers are important and challenging elements in hospital reforms. The authors study the social aspects of management and the roles of middle managers in the aftermath of a hospital merger. Especially, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how professional staff and middle managers perceive their relationships with top managers several years after the merger.

A survey was conducted among the professional staff in two merging hospitals’ units six years after a merger. Based on the main findings from this survey, a follow-up interview study was done with a group of middle managers.

The management practices were diagnostic with few interactive or communicative activities. The respondents expressed that mistrust developed between the staff and the top management, and a lack of involvement and interaction lead to decoupled and parallel organizations. Social controls, based on shared norms, had not been developed to create mutual commitment and engagement.

Policy makers should be aware of the need in profound change processes not only to change the tangible elements, but to take care of changing the less tangible elements such as norms and values. Professionals in hospitals are in powerful positions, and changes in such organizations are dependent on trust-building, bottom-up initiatives and evolutionary pathways.

The paper addresses the need to understand the dynamics of the social aspect in managing hospitals as knowledge-intensive organizations when comprehensive restructuring processes are taking place over several years.

Top management commitment is considered a significant factor in improvement programmes, and many papers have been written about the role of top management commitment in implementing a quality management system. However, not considering other management levels’ commitment, such as middle management, may lead to issues in achieving organisational development. Public organisations that work through vertical structures may face a lack of middle management commitment, which might have a negative impact on lower and non-management staff commitment to improvement programmes. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of middle management’s commitment towards improvement initiatives in public organisations.

Empirical research with a mixed-method design used semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire to explore the current practices of continuous improvement (CI) and examine employees’ views from different management levels of the implications of current improvements in a Saudi public service organisation.

The analysis indicated that the lower managers and non-management staff agree that, after the implementation of the quality management system, the organisation’s middle management showed a lack of commitment to that system. Moreover, this lack of commitment is recognised in the analysis of participants’ views of CI practices recorded in the questionnaire and interviews. This lack of commitment has caused poor employee commitment and thus a lack of problem solving in organisational departments. It is also responsible for a lack of employee involvement, the centralisation of decisions, deficiencies in terms of determining and applying training, inequality between employees and a lack of trust between employees and their managers. These issues could be managed and resolved through middle management and their commitment.

Increasing middle managers’ awareness of the importance of their commitment to improvement initiatives can have an impact on employees’ commitment towards improvement initiatives, especially in those public organisations that have vertical/hierarchical structures. The level of commitment towards the implementation of improvement programmes needs further in-depth analyses to identify which factors influence public organisation leaders’ commitment to improvement programmes.

The results of this study could motivate middle managers in public organisations to review their policies and to facilitate CI initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to: address how the library middle management role has changed; assist middle managers in identifying new opportunities and broadening their horizon within middle management; offer strategies for middle managers to be more efficient and effective in the changing era; and lay out the challenges middle managers are facing to further discussions.

Both authors have been middle managers for many years and are experiencing the change from the traditional roles. As the new roles are emerging, the authors have done literature reviews in order to understand what factors have caused the changes, how middle managers can deal with these changes, and identify the challenges they will face. Through research, the authors have also studied how business managers handle changes and identify areas from which library middle managers can gain insight.

The authors identify the causes of the changes that impact middle managers in academic libraries, through evaluation of day‐to‐day experiences and literature research.

Since this is a new trend, the data are difficult to collect and the best practices are still under development in many academic libraries. Research implications are in the new roles for middle managers, including roles in communication channels, management teams, collaboration, and responsibilities.

The authors identify the new roles in middle management in a few areas: communication, management teams, collaboration, and responsibilities. The paper also outlines keys for being effective in middle management, including total quality management, staff readiness, and thinking outside of the box.

The paper addresses the cause of the changing roles for middle management and the specific impact that these changes are having on middle managers. This paper also identifies the new roles being undertaken by middle managers.

This article aims to examine middle managers in health care and how their role has changed in times of fiscal constraints. It seeks to focus particularly on how cost savings influence the position of middle managers in the organisation between governance and advocacy pressure.

A total of 25 Swedish middle managers from public health care organisations during fiscal constraints were interviewed about what contributes to their positioning in the organisation.

The loyalty of middle managers is tested in the “in between” role. Excessive loyalty, in any direction, can distance a middle manager from their expected position. In times of a weakening economy, middle managers are expected to be a tool that is used by the management to communicate savings, personnel reductions, redundancies and closures. This contributes to middle managers sliding out of their role in between.

Middle managers’ skills are within care itself. In times of cost savings, demands are placed on their ability to handle advanced management tasks. They need to gain a clearer insight into management control, understanding conflict management and leadership.

The article explains not only why middle managers slide up (take on governance roles) and down (take on advocacy roles) in the organisation, which has been described previously. It also explains why middle managers slide out (abdicate responsibility) of the role between governance and advocacy during times of fiscal limitations.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how political activities and processes influence sensemaking and sensegiving among top management, middle management and employees and to examine its consequences for implementing new knowledge.

Data were collected in a Norwegian bank using in-depth interviews with middle managers and financial advisers. Observations of meetings, informal conversations and verbatim notes were also used in data collection among top managers. A practice-based approach was used as an analytical lens.

Top managers' political activities of excluding others from the decision process affect their sensemaking and resulted in sensegiving contradictions between spoken intent and how to change practice. Middle managers' political activities were to accept top managers' sensegiving instead of managing themselves in their own sensemaking to help financial advisers with how to change their role and practice. As a result, middle managers' sensemaking affects their engagement in sensegiving. For financial advisers, the political processes of top and middle managers resulted in resistance and not making sense of how to change and implement new knowledge.

A total of 30 in-depth interviews, observations of five meetings and informal conversations might call for further studies. In addition, a Norwegian study does not account for other countries' cultural differences concerning leadership style, openness in decisions and employee autonomy.

To the author's knowledge, no studies identify the three-way conceptual relationship between political activities, sensemaking and sensegiving. In addition, the author believes that the originality lies in investigating these relationships using a three-level hierarchy of top management, middle management and employees.

Approximately 5 per cent of the non‐farm work force in the United States falls into the category of middle managers. The variations in titles and responsibilities in organizations make it difficult precisely to define middle managers; but they can generally be regarded as those who manage other managers and supervisors, and groups of primarily exempt employees. Thus at the lower limit for classification as a middle manager we would exclude first line supervisors of salaried clerical and hourly production employees. At the upper limit for classification as a middle manager we would exclude managers of business components who have profit and loss responsibility, functional and staff vice presidents, and all other executives in the hierarchy above those categories.

Women constitute only approximately 3‐5 per cent of Australian senior managers. One possible explanation of their failure to enter senior management in greater numbers is that women in management may have differing perceptions of the necessary prerequisites for promotion to senior roles. This study explored this possibility with 351 male and 156 female Australian middle managers, whose views were contrasted with senior managers’ perceptions. Gender differences in perception were found between middle managers and middle and senior managers in terms of the importance placed on personal qualities such as attractiveness, deference to superiors, likeability, personality, popularity and powerful allies (perceived charisma) as attributes considered necessary for achieving senior management promotion. In particular, female middle managers believed more strongly than their male counterparts, that senior managers would value the personal qualities encompassed in perceived charisma when considering middle managers for further promotion. However, senior managers did not consider this group of attributes to be important in promotion‐seeking behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how middle managers utilize performance measurement information in their work. More specifically, the study gives understanding on the impact of performance measurement, policies and procedures (formal controls), and individual intuition and experiential knowledge (informal controls) on strategy implementation and decision making. The study also identifies hindrances to the use of measurement information.

The study is carried out as a semi-structured interview study in Finnish companies representing five industries and 29 interviewees. Empirical data were analyzed deductively according to the research framework combining informal and formal management controls with two managerial processes.

The work of middle managers is clearly affected by informal controls. Much of the managerial work relies on individual intuition and judgment based on experience instead of performance information or formal instructions. The study also unveiled that top management sees the status of utilizing performance measurement information in a more positive light than do middle managers. This is the case especially in strategy implementation. Deficiency of measurement information was found to be a key factor hindering the use of measurement information but improper analysis of results is also a challenge.

This study examined the work of middle managers widely in different positions and industries which means that the findings are rather explorative. Simplification was required in order to operationalize the complex tasks of strategy implementation and decision making. Further, more contextually focused research is required in order to understand better the contextual causes of the findings and to provide more understanding on the appropriate ways of improving the utilization of performance measurement information.

The practical contribution of this study lies in the detailed description of strategy implementation and decision-making processes based on observations in several large companies representing different industries. The study also suggests areas to which development efforts should be concentrated on in order to improve the use of performance information among middle managers.

This study contributes to the earlier literature by highlighting the usage of performance measurement information as opposed to developing new measures. In addition, the novelty value of the paper relates to the focus in the work of middle managers which has gained less attention in the previous research.

Wilson argues that knowledge management (KM) maturity is an extension of information management and effective management of work practices. Gallagher and Hazlett state that there is too much effort addressing technological concerns in KM while offering little practical assistance. Kruger and Snyman believe KM is a strategic resource with ICT and information management as enablers in establishing KM maturity. These three positions of KM growth and maturity reflect the huge spectrum of and diverse views. But, very little is known about the KM growth or maturity that occurs in different industries, or how employees and managers perceive growth in KM maturity. This paper aims to address these issues.

From a large urban South African University engaged in numerous collaboration programmes with industry, the authors gain insight into the growth of KM in industry groupings over a five‐year period. The authors apply an inventory developed by Kruger and Snyman to a set of 86 organisations distributed over nine economic sectors in South Africa. In total 434 employees are interviewed over three group levels (operational, middle and senior management). This is achieved by interviewing 178 senior practitioners in three subjects (one in each group level).

Analysis of the growth in KM maturity, as it relates to different organisational sizes, reveals that there are statistical differences between the score reported by small, medium, large and extra‐large organisations and between the scores reported by senior, middle and operational personnel. Findings also indicate that growth in KM differs between industry groupings, with high growth in construction, building materials and mining (±70 per cent), and low growth in educational institutions (±40 per cent).

This paper is of relevance to KM practitioners interested in gaining insight into KM maturity growth that occurred in different organisational groupings and at different operational levels across an extremely diversified environment.

This paper examines how a public sector organization combined management control systems (MCS) to comply with increased uncertainty and conflicting objectives of tight budget control, flexibility, and quality care simultaneously. It also analyzes how middle managers interpret management control intentions and manage conflicting objectives, and how locally developed MCS are coupled with top management goals.

This paper uses a case-study approach, based on interviews with top and middle managements, as well as document studies conducted at a medium-sized Danish municipality.

Both constraining and enabling control systems empower middle managers and facilitate tight budget controls. Furthermore, middle managers play a crucial role in the use of MCS, develop local control systems, adjust existing control systems and influence the decisions and strategies of top management.

This paper is context-specific, and the role of accounting in professional work varies due to the specific techniques involved.

This paper shows how MCS, including budgeting and planning systems, can be applied in social services to help middle managements obtain tight budget controls while also improving service quality.

This paper adds to the limited extant research on the role of middle management in a control framework and demonstrates how MCS can balance conflicting goals in social services when uncertainty increases. Furthermore, this paper shows how the vertical coupling of MCS is tight when budgeting is employed for planning purposes.