It is not uncommon to hear that the intransigence of middle managers is the principle barrier to implementing change in organisations. They are portrayed as entrenched in the ‘way things are done around here’. They are seen as unreceptive to the vision of senior managers and deaf to the innovative ideas of forthright and forward thinking employees. So, often has this story of middle management been repeated it has become an article of modern management faith. It doesn't take much to confirm the bias that middle managers are to blame for all organisational ills.

Occasionally, the term ‘learned helplessness’ is used to describe the lack of commitment and engagement shown by middle managers. Learned helplessness is a term that is used to describe a management layer that is apathetic, lacking engagement, unwilling, and an impediment to change. The principle image is one of ‘helplessness’.

However, there are two errors in this story that are too easily glossed over. First, the focus on helplessness leads us to overlook that the behaviour is ‘learned’; and second, it commits a common (and well known) decision error where people place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (e.g. personality) to explain someone else’s behaviour or performance rather than considering external factors that might be influencing the behaviour. This is called Fundamental Attribution Error or Correspondence Bias. In short, we source the problem to the person and ignore the environment.

The term learned helplessness originally described behaviour in animals that had been exposed to inescapable pain over time. The experiments originally conducted in the 1960s showed that animals put in this position eventually just gave up and became helpless. When the opportunity was provided to escape the pain (through behaviour they had previously learned) the animals continued to take no action. So, exposure to uncontrollable events reliably impaired the animal’s motivation and ability to learn. The helplessness was learned and it was lasting.

The important point here is the outcome learned helplessness is not an inherent characteristic of the animal. The causal factor is the environmental conditions to which the animal has been exposed over time.

Applying the term learned helplessness to managers would suggest the observed behaviours of passivity, disengagement and reduced problem solving arise from prolonged exposure to an organisational setting in which restrictive control and reduced autonomy are the norm. The organisational environment cannot be changed or challenged by the middle manager, and so they learn to be passive.

A senior leadership climate, work design, decision structure or organisational culture that reinforces conformity and discourages initiative leads middle managers toward this behaviour. Maybe should be questioning how we are positioning the role of middle managers in our organisations such that this behaviour is the outcome. It doesn’t take long to find engagement studies focusing at the level of individual behaviour that confirm passivity and disengagement; however, few of these focus on the context of middle management.

So, what is the environment like for middle managers?

In 1986, Rosabeth Moss Kanter painted a picture of powerlessness for middle managers caught between conflicting expectations: “The squeeze between the demands of strategies they do not influence and the ambitions of increasingly independent-minded employees.” There is some evidence that this has not changed in the last 30 years. 

Similarly, in 1988, Peter Drucker in talking about emerging information technologies referred to: ‘whole layers of management that neither make decisions nor lead … instead their main, if only function, is to serve as relays, human boosters for the faint and unfocused signals that pass for communication in the traditional, pre-information organisations’. Again, surveys of today’s information-technology rich organisations suggest that while the volume of information has increased the clarity of internal communication has not. Consequently, middle managers most likely remain trapped as interpreters and organisational relays with little control and low levels of autonomy.

In the drive toward the ‘flatter’ structures that are uncritically characterised as better than ‘hierarchy’, the role and contribution of middle management is often questioned. But, maybe, we should take the view structure follows strategy. A view that we should pay more attention to the design our organisations, and more thoughtfully and carefully consider the way the way work is done. Maybe, we would get a better outcome.

If we took this view, we might see middle management as critical to stability, innovation and communication. How can they be responsible for stability and innovation? They are central to the stability that is necessary for coherent day-to-day performance, and they are among the first to see the possibility for innovation and change.

If we took this view, we might even go so far as to give consideration to the way would enable the control, autonomy and trust that is central to middle managers doing what is asked of them. If we did this, we might see a different story of engagement, commitment and involvement emerge. So, by paying attention to the organisational environment we might get a glimpse of the performance benefits that would flow to the organisation from a crucial management layer.