BACKGROUND The theory of middle managers' role in implementing healthcare innovations hypothesized that middle managers influence implementation effectiveness by fulfilling the following four roles: diffusing information, synthesizing information, mediating between strategy and day-to-day activities, and selling innovation implementation. The theory also suggested several activities in which mi...

BACKGROUND Middle managers have received little attention in extant health services research, yet they may have a key role in healthcare innovation implementation. The gap between evidence of effective care and practice may be attributed in part to poor healthcare innovation implementation. Investigating middle managers' role in healthcare innovation implementation may reveal an opportunity for...

This article reviews studies that examine the impact of information technology (IT) on the number of middle managers in organizations. We find contradictory evidence suggesting, paradoxically, that IT both increases and decreases the number of the middle managers. We resolve this "empirical paradox", by looking at the effects of IT on middle managers as contingent upon the degree of centralizat...

This paper presents an empirical study on the contribution made by middle managers to the development of strategy in an organisation. The data was collected using semi-structured interviews with middle-managers and top-managers in companies large enough to have the middle management layer in the organisational hierarchy. The data was analysed using a qualitative approach. Previous studies in th...

Towards a different view of middle managers and their roles in strategic decentralisation processes-(7350 words) Summary Middle managers have often been blamed for being inflexible status quo defenders in organisational change processes. However, research results reported in this paper, drawn from in-depth case studies of company restructuring in Germany during the nineties, suggests that middl...

Background: Middle managers within healthcare hold a unique position between senior leadership and frontline staff, and may hold a pivotal function in the implementation of quality improvement (QI) projects. This review aims to explore what is known about healthcare middle managers’ role in implementing QI initiatives, and to determine if consensus around their role exists amongst middle manage...

We conducted a qualitative study of Nokia to understand its rapid downfall over the 2005–2010 period from its position as a world-dominant and innovative technology organization. We found that top and middle managers’ shared emotions during the smartphone innovation process caused cycles of behaviors that harmed both the process and its outcome. Together, organizational attention structures and...