Heroes or Villains? Recasting Middle Management Roles, Processes, and Behaviours

Middle management ranks are once again being questioned by scholars and practitioners alike. This introduction to the special issue represents a timely reference point for consolidating, reviving, and guiding the next wave of researchers seeking to engage this debate. We review the foundations and recent advances in middle management research and develop an organizing framework in terms of middle management's organizational roles, coordination processes, and agentic behaviours. We also identify how new ways of organizing, technology, and middle manager needs are changing to shape each of these themes. The collection of works we synthesize in this introduction offer theoretical advances and empirical evidence on how these changes affect middle management roles, processes, and behaviours. We conclude by mapping out promising research avenues for future research in middle management

Mapping and managing productive organizational energy over time: the energy pattern explorer tool

To strategically manage the deployment of collective human resources toward performance, managers must recognize, interpret, and align the volatile resources of productive organizational energy. Despite relevant prior work, research and practice still lack a comprehensive approach toward analyzing and managing energy patterns over time. We develop a framework for temporal configurations and prototypical trajectories of productive organizational energy. We then introduce the ‘Energy Pattern Explorer’ as a strategy tool to: (1) identify and predict actual patterns of productive organizational energy in organizations, and (2) suggest energy leadership activities specific to current and anticipated changes and patterns of productive organizational energy. We provide examples of how managers can use this tool and conclude with suggestions for research and practice

It Matters How Old You Feel : Antecedents and Performance Consequences of Average Relative Subjective Age in Organizations

This article extends the conceptual knowledge of average relative subjective age in organizations by exploring organizational-level antecedents and consequences of employees, on average, feeling younger than their chronological age. We draw from the theories of selection-optimization-compensation and socioemotional selectivity to build a theoretical framework for relative subjective age in organizations. We hypothesize that companies in which employees, on average, perceive themselves to be younger than they actually are have a higher average individual goal accomplishment and, in turn, experience higher company performance. We further hypothesize that employees' average experience of high work-related meaning relates to a lower subjective age in organizations. In addition, we assess the role of environmental dynamism and age-inclusive human resource management as moderators in this theoretical model. Through empirically testing this model in a multisource dataset, including 107 companies with 15,164 participating employees, we received support for the hypothesized relationships. Our results contribute to current debates in the scientific literature on age and have important practical implications in light of the demographic changes faced by many companies. This research indicates to both researchers and practitioners that it is not employees' chronological age but their subjective age, a factor that can be influenced, which drives organizational performance outcomes