Individual Level Antecedents to Middle Managers’ Strategic Involvement

Abstract

The strategic role of middle managers has attracted increased research attention. However, research on middle managers’ individual differences as antecedents to their strategic involvement is limited. By filling this literature gap, this paper describes middle managers’ five strategic roles, explains how individual factors affect middle managers’ strategic role enactment, and how the effects of individual antecedents on their strategic roles may differ in entrepreneurial and conservative firms. The contribution of this paper is threefold. It first contributes to the middle managers’ strategic roles literature by adding the lateral interacting role, defined as “the communication and interaction with peers – which facilitates information and recourse exchange, the collaboration on mutual tasks, and the support on social and political matters”, into the classic four-role model. Secondly, fine-grained propositions are developed to explain the effects of individual factors on their strategic roles, in terms of...