This paper explores middle managers in the professions from their position in the sandwiched middle. Based upon interviews with senior academics in management roles and their subordinates in UK Business Schools, we investigate this experienced middle through a metaphor that informs one particular subject position: to be an umbrella carrier. This position entails protecting subordinates from what is seen as unnecessary and/or damaging initiatives and information from top management above, in order to allow for good professional work to take place below. This form of counter-management which aims to weaken hierarchical pressure rather than enforce or uphold it, is informed by a stronger identification with the profession and subordinates below than with the leader role or the superiors above and aids the middle managers in their identity work.
This article explores how experienced leaders address an inherent tension between leader role expectations and leader role identities when they enter a new position. Building on analysis of interviews with leaders in intrarole transition, role, and identity theories, we suggest they engage in a process of leader role crafting. We present four sets of role-crafting strategies which aim to influence the development of leader roles, and show how leader role identities both facilitate and impede the use of these. The article contributes to the leadership literature by extending contemporary perspectives on dynamic roles and role identities, while shedding light on an important challenge for today's leaders who are faced with a particularly ambiguous and demanding role that is always in the making. The study also adds to practice by suggesting ways that leaders can engage in leader role crafting in a more reflexive manner.
This chapter addresses problems tied to when identity is used in organization studies in broad, slippery, and loose ways, with weak empirical support. The chapter shows limitations in the current over-expanded use of identity by looking at identity through a hembig-lens (i.e., when a concept is hegemonic, ambiguous, and big). The authors argue that identity needs to distinguish itself from and relate itself to similar concepts such as role and culture, rather than replace or be conflated with these. With the use of a simple typology—‘spot-on’, ‘stretch’, and ‘fake’—they explore previous empirical identity studies and reflect upon when these studies seem to be about identity and when other concepts, perhaps less fashionable but more to the point, would have been more fitting. The chapter suggests two main remedies in the form of theoretical scrutiny and methodological antidotes to address the current challenges in identity research in the hope it will inspire more insightful identity studies in the future.
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