Abstract:

Change management literature recognizes the positive influence of middle managers’ sensegiving to their team in order to facilitate change implementation. When middle managers effectively engage in sensegiving, they help mitigate resistance, create alignment, and foster organizational cohesion. However, middle managers’ sensegiving performance can vary: While middle managers can be protagonists of change, helping others through change, they can also be perceived as barriers to change.

Several studies have depicted middle managers’ self-interest as a major reason for their deliberately divergent responses to change. However, the sensemaking nature of change suggests that senior and middle management have different perceptions of the change-related support needed by middle managers to fulfil their role as precious sense givers. This study sought to explore senior leader’s perception of the change-enabling support needed by middle managers as well as middle management’s experience of senior leaders support behaviour. A quantitative survey was designed to understand middle managers perceptions regarding how much change-enabling support they received. This survey data was augmented with qualitative data (interviews with senior leaders) who were asked about their awareness of middle managers needs for change-enabling support.

The key findings noted that senior leaders are partially aware of the needed change-enabling support. While senior leaders recognize the importance of the needed informational support, they only partially recognize the importance of emotional, motivational, and organizational support. In terms of informational support, the quantitative results illustrated that sufficient informational support was generally provided across our sample. In terms of motivational support, quantitative results suggested that top managers generally provide sufficient motivational but emotional support is lacking in general. These empirical findings support the expansion of existing theoretical models for top managers change-enabling leadership, adding affective sense-making as a fundamental behavioural category.

Please choose your submission type: Developmental Paper

Primary Track: Organisational Transformation, Change and Development

Keywords: Change Management

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Prof Christoph Desjardins