Raes et al. (2011), Academy of Management Review

The Interface of the Top Management Team and Middle Managers: A Process Model

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.

Parts of the Loop it informs

Surface both waysSupports Make sense togetherSupports Start it close to the workSupports

Read the original paper

Summary written by Unfrozen from the published abstract, then checked twice by independent reviewers against the source. Loop coding is exploratory and AI-assisted, pending human verification. Spot an error? Email info@unfreeze.us and it gets fixed.

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.Huy et al. (2014)Over 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.Raelin & Cataldo (2011)At a large financial services firm, the authors trace a failed change initiative to closed-off executive and rank-and-file systems that left middle managers powerless, an outcome they link to the firm being bought out.Starke et al. (2011)At 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.