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Middle managers’ roles and behaviours during organizational change : a qualitative study among managers and employees.

Nannings, E.R.H. (2017) Middle managers’ roles and behaviours during organizational change : a qualitative study among managers and employees.

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Abstract:In the last couple of years a lot of research has been conducted on effective leadership during an organizational change. A critique on these studies is that it does not include the effect of the leadership on employees. Next to this, the role of middle management is also an important topic during change and sometimes underestimated. Middle managers are close to employees and therefore have a big influence in successfully implementing the change. They can adopt different roles and behaviours to influence the implementation of the organizational change. Therefore, this research focusses on what roles and behaviours middle management adopt during change and how these roles and behaviours are perceived by employees during an organizational change.The goal of this research was to investigate what kind of roles and behaviours middle managers take on during an organizational change, and how employees experience these roles. Furthermore, what behaviours and roles employees prefer of their middle manager during a change was investigated.The main conclusion of this study is that the middle management adopted an passive leadership behaviour during the organizational change and did not adopt the role of sensemaker. Surprisingly, the employees did not judge their middle managers for this ‘wait-and-see’ attitude. This can be explained by the relational oriented behaviour the managers showed towards their employees before the organizational change. This relational-oriented behaviour was perceived very positively by employees.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:05 communication studies
Programme:Communication Studies MSc (60713)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/72977
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