Performance Feedback and Middle Managers’ Divergent Strategic Behavior

What drives middle managers to search for new strategic initiatives and champion them to top management? This behavior—labeled divergent strategic behavior—spawns emergent strategies and thereby provides one of the essential ingredients of strategic renewal. We conceptualize divergent strategic behavior as a response to performance feedback. Data from 123 senior middle managers overseeing 21 multi-country organizations (MCOs) of a Fortune 500 firm point to social performance comparisons rather than historical comparisons in driving divergent strategic behavior. Moreover, managers’ organizational identification affects whether they attend to organizational- or individual-level feedback. These results contribute to research on performance aspirations and strategy process by providing a multilevel, multidimensional framework of performance aspirations in middle management driven strategic renewal

A psychological perspective on middle managers’ championing behavior

Organizations rely on middle managers’ championing novel strategic initiatives to provide a much needed competitive edge. Existing literature on championing focus on structural conditions regarding whether or when managers fulfill the championing role, and neglect managers’ individual motivational drivers for championing. Integrating goal orientations theory and team contextual factors, we develop and test a cross-level model which proposes that individual differences in goal orientations may motivate managers to search for or avoid new strategic initiatives, and that individual motivational orientations flourish in different intra-team contexts. Based on data from 181 middle managers in 26 teams of a large company, we found that learning and prove goal orientations affect championing behavior positively, whereas avoid orientation has a negative effect when the team is not behaviorally integrate