Getting caught in “the chair effect” after becoming a manager

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Unfortunately, in most organizations, the promotion process is not always managed under fairness conditions and usually, this issue produces harmful results for both organizations and employees. One of these results refers to the people who are promoted to managerial positions. After the promotion process, negative changes such as being selfish, manipulative, rude, behaving unfairly, underestimating others, putting exaggerated distance to his/her relations with others, are observed in their positive behaviors and attitudes that they displayed within the organization in the past. Many reasons can be cited for this situation. The degree and scope of the status may be one of the reasons for this change and this study named this phenomenon as “Chair Effect”. The chair is one of the major symbols representing managerial positions, and for this reason, the term chair is used in naming this effect. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to examine the “Chair Effect” phenomenon and define the possible factors which cause this phenomenon. METHOD: An inductive and qualitative research method is used in this study. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview technique with 12 participants who are middle- level and upper-level managers and have experience or observation about any manager who got caught in the chair effect. The Gioia method was used in the data analysis process. RESULTS: According to the results of the study, the factors that cause the chair effect are classified into three categories such as individual factors, organizational factors, and contextual factors. CONCLUSION: In the promotion processes of the organizations, evaluating the manager candidates’ personality traits and their success in relationship management besides their other qualifications (such as experience, performance degree, seniority time) objectively will be effective to cope with “the chair effect” issue.