Reitzig & Maciejovsky (2015), Strategic Management Journal

Corporate hierarchy and vertical information flow inside the firm—a behavioral view

Taller hierarchies pulled middle managers two ways, toward sending more suggestions upward to avoid costly omissions and toward holding back out of fear of judgment; field data and experiments found both forces, each winning under different conditions.

Parts of the Loop it informs

Surface both waysMixed

Read the original paper

Summary written by Unfrozen from the published abstract, then checked twice by independent AI 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.

Questions this study helps answer

What the research saysWhy doesn't bad news reach senior leaders?What the research saysHow can middle managers get ideas heard by senior leaders?What the research saysHow can leaders tell a change is stuck before the numbers show it?

Related studies

Vuori & Huy (2016)At Nokia, fearful middle managers shared less bad news upward while top managers did not fully reveal how serious the outside threat was; leaders grew overly optimistic and the smartphone effort suffered.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.Wei et al. (2015)Among 66 middle managers and 262 of their staff in five high-tech firms, employees who valued power distance felt less able to offer improvement ideas, a link that weakened when their boss delegated more.Currie et al. (2015)In hospital care for older people, nurse middle managers could pass knowledge down to fellow nurses but struggled to pass it up the hierarchy or across to doctors; without HR support, the authors warn, a 'broken' rather than 'broker' chain may result.