Doing yourself out of a job?. How middle managers cope with empowerment
| Pages | 147-159 |
| Published date | 01 April 1997 |
| Date | 01 April 1997 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01425459710171030 |
| Author | Nicola Denham,Peter Ackers,Cheryl Travers |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Doing yourself
out of a job?
147
Doing yourself out of a job?
How middle managers cope with
empowerment
Nicola Denham, Peter Ackers and Cheryl Travers
Loughborough University Business School, Loughborough,UK
Introduction
Much has been written of the plight of middle managers through the years.
Interestingly, from 1945 (Roethlisberger, 1945; Whyte and Gardner, 1945) to the
present day (Collard and Dale, 1989; Foy, 1994; Marchington et al., 1992) the
majority of arguments as to how and why managers resist new policies have
remained the same. Middle managers are seen as the agents of senior
management who must introduce new policies to a cynical workforce while
facing fears of redundancy and loss of power.
This paper investigates how such theories relate to the modern concept of
“empowerment”. We base our argument on research conducted within two large
organizations – one in the public sector and one in the private sector – which are
adopting empowerment programmes and form part of wider research on the
effects of such policies in modern organizations. Based on interviews with
senior and middle managers and employee focus groups, the paper seeks to
answer three central questions:
(1) How does empowerment affect middle managers?
(2) What coping mechanisms do they use?
(3) What are the implications for the organization and how can these be
investigated by further research?
We argue that middle managers tend to cope with empowerment by, to varying
extents, “acting” out their compliance to the initiative and that this may affect
its ultimate success within the organization.
Empowerment
As modern organizations “downsize” and become more preoccupied with
quality, empowerment has emerged as an increasingly popular initiative.
Empowerment has been promoted by most as a policy which will contribute to
a new kind of organization where both employees and employer work together
to produce profits while all benefit from a better quality of working life (Block,
1990; Foy, 1994). The ethos behind empowerment is usually driven by the belief
that no one knows a job better than the person who does it and, therefore, by
allowing those who are most knowledgeable to make decisions on the day-to-
day issues surrounding their jobs, the organization becomes more efficient. Employee Relations,
Vol. 19 No. 2, 1997, pp. 147-159.
© MCB University Press, 0142-5455
Received February 1997
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