Emotional balancing of organizational continuity and radical change: the contribution of middle managers

Administrative Science Quarterly, March, 2002 by Quy Nguyen Huy

Competitive pressures caused by globalization, deregulation, and discontinuous technological changes seem to have forced many organizations into considering radical change as a way of surviving and growing. A radical change is a qualitative alteration of an organization's rules of organizing--the fundamental rules that members use to interact cognitively and behaviorally with the world around them (Miller and Friesen, 1984; Greenwood and Hinings, 1996). Radical changes may be infrequent in organizational life, but they are consequential to an organization's life chances: realizing radical change is difficult, and disappointments and mortality risks are significant (Singh, House, and Tucker, 1986; Hambrick and D'Aveni, 1988).

While radical change seems at times necessary for organizational adaptation, both continuity and change are typically simultaneously present in an organization and may even be necessary for its continuous adaptation over the long term (e.g., Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997; Leana and Barry, 2000). Organizations pursue change to enhance their competitive positions and to grow. At the same time, they seek to sustain their competitive advantage by reducing uncertainty and securing continuity in exploiting their resources. Furthermore, although organizations may at times need to transform themselves rapidly to meet new institutional demands, such as deregulation and global competition, they typically have to maintain operational continuity to provide services to customers, preserve institutional legitimacy, and secure the resources to fund costly changes (Oliver, 1991). Although much research has been done on radical change, little has been done on maintaining continuity during such change, a task that generally falls to middle managers, who must also implement change.

This tension between continuity and change also exists on the individual level. Employees seek predictable relationships, dependable resources, and consistency in behavior and thinking, while simultaneously seeking new stimulation and personal development. Individuals are more likely to join collective action, such as implementing change, when there is trust, support, or organizational identification (Leana and Van Buren, 1999). Part of the continuity and change tradeoff thus involves maintaining the emotional balance of individuals in the company and attending to emotion-management activities (Staw, Sutton, and Pelled, 1994; Huy, 1999; Bartel and Saavedra, 2000) so that employees continue to be productive during radical change. This study explores how middle managers do this by managing the emotional states of their employees in a radical change context, a role that would not be predicted by the literature on radical change.

Middle management has often been singled out as the primary locus for resistance to radical change (Biggart, 1977; Miles, 1997), even though the literature on middle managers has documented their proactive contribution to organizational innovation in incremental-change contexts. In such an environment, middle managers are motivated to act under familiar incentives and structurally predesigned reward systems (e.g., Nutt, 1987; Uyterhoeven, 1989; Westley, 1990; Floyd and Lane, 2000). Yet, in planned radical change, middle management's contributions are seen as much weaker. The literature tends to de-emphasize the role of middle managers and to portray them in a relatively self-effacing role as compared with executives. Middle managers have been portrayed as de-energized and emotionally stricken in the face of the overwhelming power and drive of turnaround executives (Noer, 1993; O'Neill and Lenn, 1995). Tushman and Romanelli (1985: 173-180) contended that "only executive leadership can mediate between forces fo r convergence and forces for change" and "implement the set of discontinuous changes" in radical change, whereas middle management "interpolates structures and systems" in incremental-change contexts. Most normative models of strategy tend to accord middle management a supporting role at best (Shrivastava, 1986); executives are advised to reduce equivocalness so that middle managers can act on clear instructions. Conventional wisdom suggests that middle managers tend to attenuate the pace and magnitude of the quantum organizational learning required in a radical change (Floyd and Woolridge, 1996).

Executives view middle managers as part of the inertial systems and barriers to change that need to be co-opted, sidelined, or disposed of, if attempts at co-optation fail (Biggart, 1977; Tichy and Sherman, 1994). Such views overlook the role that middle managers may play in maintaining continuity during radical change.

Fundamental change in personnel, strategy, organizational identity, or established work roles and interests often triggers intense emotions (Bartunek, 1984). Emotions in turn affect how different groups interpret a proposed change and how they behave. How organizations attend to a rich range of employees' emotions could facilitate or hinder the progress of ambitious change (Huy, 1999). But there has been little systematic empirical research on the interaction of multiple groups during radical change (for a review, see Rajagopalan and Spreitzer, 1997) or on how managers deal with the emotions that this kind of change generates. Middle managers are structurally closer to their employees and so are likely to be more attuned to their subordinates' emotional needs. Compared with executives caught up in many external demands, middle managers are likely to have more time to interact with their employees. This suggests that middle managers could be key loci for emotion management during change.