There has been a long-standing debate about whether middle management should be in play and to what measure. The business and management literature has always encountered difficulty defining middle managers (McCann et. Al, 2004: 30). Yet according to Peter Aucoin “Middle management is the intermediate management of a hierarchical organization that is subordinate to the executive management and responsible for at least two lower levels of junior staff (Aucoin, 1989).” Technological advancements, like email, for instructions and communication have eliminated the roles of middle managers in transferring or translating information to the workers below them. Today, the key roles of middle managers involve motivating and keeping the employees in check. Pressures to be more cost conscious adaptable, and flexible in a global market, have made middle managers a target for downsizing. Middle managers are seen to add costs, slow down decisions, and obstruct the information flow in organisations (Korpela, 2014).
The conflict of thought about the middle management system being costly and wasteful mainly arises when the results fail to meet the expectations. This essay will begin by highlighting the importance of the presence of middle managers supported by relevant evidence and further explore the pitfalls covering the underdevelopment and underutilization of their skills (Nilakant & Ramanarayan, 1990) which proves to be wasteful. The argument presented in this essay is that middle managers are crucial for an organisation, but their numbers should be condensed in order to avoid conflict and delays and that their inclusion is not wasteful but beneficial in the long term.
Almost every organisation is broken down into fragments and layers of control. Creating a hierarchy and bureaucracy in the company. The middle managers have a positive impact on strategy and overall firm’s performance when it is based on their expertise and knowledge. In facilitating roles, they encourage and support the development of autonomous initiatives. This increases diversity in the intra-organisational ecology and enhances the organisation’s ability to create new strategies and acquire new competencies. And for their implementation role, they clarify and advance the selected or intended strategy (Floyd, 1997). This enhances the execution of a strategy. Due to downward influence, middle managers become agents of adaptability and change in order to implement contemporary strategy. The facilitating role stimulates development in others and promotes learning, increasing the ability of members to respond to change (Nonaka, 1994).
Even though the importance of middle management has been highlighted enough in terms of evolving, one cannot ignore the cons it carries along. Due to the various layers, middle management has a lot of overlapping authority and duty which results in conflicts and confusion between staff leading to a wastage of time, efficiency and productivity. The multiple management layers have introduced a larger number of managers with a higher demand in salary compared to the regular employees, resulting in an increased cost. Moreover, there are also various interdependency issues which arise within the system resulting in workers becoming inefficient and unproductive due to accountability issues and confusion arising from the lack of communication provided to the staff regarding their roles.
However, it is almost impossible for an organization to work without middle management because they are necessary for supervising the different layers of workers, mostly at the lower levels. The initial role of middle managers was to only pursue top decisions, follow standard procedures and create minimum disruption (Nilakant & Ramanayan, 2011). Middle managers are mediators of information who can go back and forth in both internal and external environments and act as linking pins between the different hierarchical levels of management in an organisation.
According to Boston College, middle managers provide the essential means for promoting the company's strengths, or competencies, to those they supervise. At present, the roles and responsibilities of middle managers have largely increased overtime. Evidence suggests that employee engagement is mostly influenced by middle managers as they are responsible and accountable for a large number of employees who work under them, in order to oversee their work and performance. In a survey of 500 employees, TINYpulse found that 70% said, their manager had utilised employee engagement strategies (Starner, 2016). These suggest that middle management is not always wasteful and costly as they various benefits to a company.
Even though, middle managers act as providers of information to the upper levels making it impossible to operate in their absence, they are somewhat held responsible for slowing down decision making processes leading to lower productivity. This is mainly due to the
poor communication between the various layers of workers below them. A study of 4,000 employees showed that approximately 46% were unsure of the tasks given by their line managers 37% experienced this uncertainty between one and three times a day (Woods, 2010).
On drawing the inference from the given data, it can be ceased that there can be some significant consequences due to the communication cleave in terms of coordinating the administration of a business. For instance, they create confusion and lower the morale of the employees, which has a direct impact on the service provided by them to the clients or customers. This also leads to stress due to last minute deadlines or incompetent efficiency, resulting in loss of trade
and time. This prove that sometimes, middle management can be a very wasteful process.
However, this idea can be challenged as in 2002, google experimented with a completely flat management without managers. It only lasted for a few months as employees directly started contacting the CEO for basic problems. As the company grew bigger, the founders bought in managers to commemorate communicating strategies, prioritising projects, collaborations, career developments, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company’s goals and core values (Garvin, 2013). They followed this design in order to prevent micromanaging and giving room for making decisions and innovation to the employees. Google introduced only a few layers in its organisation to avoid issues related to hierarchy and bureaucracy. It is interesting to note that they only have 5000 managers for more than 37,000 employees. This seems to working well for them as Google has perpetually only seen growth in its development, resulting around 21% in 2017 (Molla & Townsend, 2017).
In order to counter the limitations of this style of management, nowadays many companies are trying to cut down the number of employees, most of them being middle managers. Another process which has become really popular today is ‘Delayering’, which is a reduction in the number of levels in an organisation’s hierarchy (Hindle, 2008). It does not imply on sacking people from their jobs but instead it increases the command of senior managers and reduces the control or roles that the middle managers hold. It is the restructuring of an organisation by stripping various layers of control, supervision and managers, not exactly eliminating every level.
It can be argued that although, this approach leads to an increased workload on the remaining managers, it saves decision making time owing to the limited number of levels an idea must be passed through before it is approved. It is also less bureaucratic as the number of superiors responsible for overseeing the work flow and for accountability are very few. This better better than having a completely flat management as middle managers are the motivators of the business, the ones who can champion ideas and encourage others to embrace them as well. When the link between the primary workers and superiors is cut off completely, the flow of ideas is inhibited and changes are difficult and less likely to happen because the conciliators, the middle managers are not available and the senior managers have bigger responsibilities in overseeing a greater number of employees and making decisions, so, innovation in a way is decelerated down with delayering.
Overall, although middle managers pose various issues such as slowing down the decision making process, translating the commands of the superiors in some other way, affecting the firm’s overall efficiency and have various other setbacks, the benefits outweigh them because they somewhat support the entire system like a backbone by conveying and interpreting the organisation’s theories, developing core competencies, maximizing the performance potential and providing expertise. Hence, it can be concluded that they are useful tools for guidance, motivation and control at a smaller scale and should not be removed. However, this will depend on whether the organisation can ensure that the issues generated due to the presence of these mediators can be reduced by limiting their numbers and taking charge of the proportion of control that they are allowed to exhibit.