The Conjoint Influence of Top and Middle Management Characteristics on Management Innovation

Abstract

Management innovation entails the introduction of new-to-the-firm changes in management structures, processes, and practices intended to improve organizational functioning. We draw on relational demography theory to elucidate how behavioral dispositions stemming from top management and middle management similarity in professional characteristics (functional background and educational level) and biodemographic characteristics (age and gender) may facilitate management innovation. We argue that while a throughput functional orientation of top management can be expected to stimulate management innovation, greater similarity between top and middle management will strengthen the association between top management throughput orientation and management innovation by (1) engendering consistency in behavioral expectations between the managerial echelons and (2) motivating middle management to engage in extrarole behaviors. We test our theory on a sample of more than 8,000 top and middle managers in a cross-section of 33 organizations from 2000 to 2008 and adopt a novel content analysis-based measure of management innovation. We find compelling support for the moderating influence of professional similarity between top and middle management but uncover more complex patterns for cross-echelon similarity in biodemographic characteristics. We discuss implications for understanding the role of managers in management innovation, joint consideration of top and middle management characteristics in organizational change processes, the interplay between various types of innovation, and the measurement of management innovation. Promising future research directions are suggested.

Rethinking ‘Top‐Down’ and ‘Bottom‐Up’ Roles of Top and Middle Managers in Organizational Change: Implications for Employee Support

“…Second, we encourage the need for understanding anteceding factors that may influence why TMs and MMs take on different roles (e.g., underperformance, career aspirations, environmental conditions) as well as how different properties of change (e.g., type of change) moderate the relation between ensuing role configurations and other possible outcomes (e.g., change success, actual employee behaviours). We thus recommend expanding our understanding of organization, group, and individual level factorswhich can include factors such as values (Gentry et al, 2013), behaviours (Tuncdogan et al, 2016), personality (Furnham, 2016), succession (Georgakakis and Ruigrok, 2016), intra-echelon role differentiation (Buyl et al, 2011;Heyden et al, 2015c), and rules (Simons, 2013) -moderate the relationships between different role configurations and employee support for organizational change. This could reveal complementarities, but also substitution effects and further enrich our understanding of the various pathways to planned organizational change (Birkinshaw and Ansari, 2015).…”

Customer Co-Creation and Exploration of Emerging Technologies: The Mediating Role of Managerial Attention and Initiatives

“…These can be brought about by managerial initiatives or management innovation defined as the introduction of new systems, structures, and processes to further organizational goals (Birkinshaw et al, 2008;Heyden et al, 2015). The novelty of such initiatives may be relative to the world, to the specific market, or to the firm (Vaccaro et al, 2012).…”

60 Years of March and Simon’s Organizations: An Empirical Examination of its Impact and Influence on Subsequent Research

“…However, less research has looked at the role of middle managers in organizations, although these employees play an important role in implementing strategies (Balogun and Johnson, 2005;Wooldridge et al, 2008). Notable exceptions are studies by Glaser et al (2016) and Heyden et al (2018) who show that lower-level managers initiate and implement change. This is due to these managers more directly being closer to technological and market developments (Fourné et al, 2014).…”