Fronda & Moriceau (2008), Journal of Organizational Change Management

I am not your hero: change management and culture shocks in a public sector corporation

In 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.

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What the research saysWhy do middle managers resist change?

Related studies

Huy (2011)In 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.Thomas et al. (2011)In 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.Beck & Plowman (2009)The 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.Raes et al. (2011)The 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.