Part 2 of the Unfrozen Loop
Make sense together
Managers and their teams work out what the change means for their work, instead of just receiving it.
Announcements don't tell people what a change means for Tuesday morning. Middle managers do that translation, with their teams and with each other, and the studies here look at how it happens and what helps or hurts it.
30studies inform this part
25 support · 5 mixed · 0 challenge · 2 rated high strength
Questions about this part
Supports 25 studies
From Support to Mutiny: Shifting Legitimacy Judgments and Emotional Reactions Impacting the Implementation of Radical ChangeOver three years of a radical change, middle managers went from supporting their top leaders to mutiny as they reassessed whether those leaders were legitimate, and their emotional reactions fed rising resistance.How middle managers' group‐focus emotions and social identities influence strategy implementationIn a three-year case at a large tech firm, executives treating strategy as a purely task-focused job unintentionally stirred middle managers' group identities around tenure and language; the resulting emotions saw managers, even ones executives promoted, back or quietly brush off an initiative.Firm Bosses or Helpful Neighbours? The Ambiguity and Co‐Construction of MNE Regional Management MandatesAt Unilever, regional mandates given to subsidiaries proved ambiguous; several units negotiated what they meant and reshaped their scope over time, with boundary-spanning middle managers doing the most intense sensemaking.Reversing course: Competing technologies, mistakes, and renewal in flat panel displaysAfter IBM's plasma display bet failed, middle-level champions recast the case for LCDs in business terms for senior managers, and IBM went on to lead LCDs.Leading change in public organisations: the role of mediatorsIn an Italian court house modernisation, middle-manager 'mediators' translated leaders' ideas in three distinct ways, and the approaches differed in how well they turned those ideas into everyday work.The Politics of Middle Management Sensemaking and SensegivingIn an insurance company's change effort, middle managers used their business expertise and political moves to steer how even their bosses understood the change.Managing Organizational Change: Negotiating Meaning and Power-Resistance RelationsIn a telecom company's culture-change workshop, senior and middle managers negotiated meaning in two very different patterns, set by how they talked to each other, which the authors relate to generative dialogue and to power and resistance.Organizational Change and Managerial Sensemaking: Working Through ParadoxAt Lego, middle managers charged with carrying out a major restructuring struggled for meaning; reflecting jointly with researchers brought their dilemmas into view as paradoxes, and the authors set out a process for working through them.Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in an engineering groupWhen corporate management used strategy talk to tighten control at an engineering group, middle managers answered with a strategy language of their own to keep room to act.Committees as strategic practice: The role of strategic conversation in a public administrationIn a public administration rolling out staff development, middle and senior managers shaped strategy not just in formal committee meetings but in informal conversations around them, where they built shared understanding, aligned on issues and pre-arranged support.Strategy development through interview technique from narrative therapyA purchasing department wrote its own strategy by telling stories about work, and the director signed off on it.‘It Sends a Cold Shiver down my Spine’: Ghostly Interruptions to Strategy ImplementationIn conversations at a Danish local government's strategy seminar, middle managers glimpsed darker futures behind the familiar strategy and voiced a sense that something different had to be done, though they could not say what.Organizational Ambidexterity and the Hybrid Middle Manager: The Case of Patient Safety in UK HospitalsIn UK hospitals, clinician-managers balanced proven safety routines with new practice when they had professional legitimacy, strong networks and a broad view of their professional role.Materializing Strategy in Mundane Tools: the Key to Coupling Global Strategy and Local Strategy Practice?In one bank branch, a middle manager turned head-office strategy into simple local tools, engaging frontline staff and hitting the targets senior leaders wanted.Video methods in strategy research: Focusing on embodied cognitionApplying a video-analysis toolkit to middle managers during a large strategic change, the authors argue that much apparent shared understanding was emotional contagion, carried by managers' bodies as well as their words.Paradoxifying Organizational Change: Cynicism and Resistance in the Swedish Armed ForcesSwedish Armed Forces unit managers met years of reforms with cynicism, which the authors read as a way of making sense of contradictions, not just resistance.Middle Managers' Sensemaking and Interorganizational Change Initiation: Translation Spaces and Editing PracticesMiddle managers from five large French public works firms, meeting as a cross-company study group, made sense of a shared digital design model set to reshape their sector by translating and reworking ideas together.The Work of Middle Managers: Sensemaking and Sensegiving for Creating Positive Social ChangeThe authors argue that middle managers keep corporate social initiatives alive by making sense of, and explaining, the pull between profit and social goals, and suggest ways organizations can build those skills.The Work of Middle ManagersThe authors argue that middle managers keep corporate social initiatives alive by balancing profit and social demands, and propose a model, illustrated with field data, of how they do this work and the capacities it takes.Constructing Interlocking Rationales in Top‐driven Strategic RenewalIn a top-driven renewal, after top managers repositioned the middle level, middle managers built reputation through operational efficiency, then shaped their own strategic role, until top and middle were reinforcing each other's efforts.The Interface of the Top Management Team and Middle Managers: A Process ModelThe authors propose that how top teams and middle managers interact, including their role behaviors and mutual trust, shapes both the quality of strategic decisions and how well they are carried out.Everyday Sensegiving: A Closer Look at Successful Plant ManagersInterviews and site visits at 11 plants in nine industries found each successful plant manager actively shaping how employees saw the organization and its values; four central values emerged: people, openness, positivity and community.Middle Managers, Strategic Sensemaking, and Discursive CompetenceDrawing on field vignettes, the authors show middle managers moved strategic change by pairing the right words with the right setting, using familiar verbal, symbolic and cultural cues to pull in people from other levels.Experiencing Rare and Unusual Events Richly: The Role of Middle Managers in Animating and Guiding Organizational InterpretationThe authors propose that middle managers, caught between top and front-line views, can help organizations learn from rare events by first stirring up differing interpretations and later blending them into a richer shared read.I am not your hero: change management and culture shocks in a public sector corporationIn a telecom takeover, senior leaders who left out middle managers' voices ran into trouble implementing change; the authors argue resistance can be a check on over-optimistic plans.
Mixed 5 studies
The Trojan horse mechanism and reciprocal sense-giving to urgent strategic changeIn a European merger, executives won fast buy-in by getting trusted old-guard insiders to vouch for the change, at the risk of resentment later.Exploring archetypal change: the importance of leadership and its substitutesAt a small manufacturer, most of a transformation happened after its champion CEO left and an unsupportive former CEO returned, with supervisors, staff and new systems filling the leadership gap.Identity regulation, identity work and phronesisAt Disneyland, middle managers pushed back on a company script that put effectiveness ahead of ethics, recasting themselves as seekers of practical wisdom.Fostering strategic awareness at an organization's boundaryIn a survey of tellers and customer service staff at one large regional bank, strategy messages from top and middle managers were tied to frontline strategic awareness in different ways, and the two sources interacted.Taking the long viewDuring one organization's reengineering, supervisors' memories of how things used to be both helped and hindered change, suggesting a workplace culture cannot simply be wiped clean and rebuilt.