Middle management a reinforcement of change

Abstract

Organizations face a highly competitive and continuously evolving business environment. As a result, many companies have been looking for ways to improve their business: that is, providing better services at lower cost, improving customer satisfaction, and staying competitive, in which the successful management of change is crucial to survive and succeed. While organisations often deliberately try to plan change to make it more manageable, organizational realities tend to be more messy and noisy than can be effectively planned for. The findings arising from this essay suggest that middle managers play an important role in facilitating change in organizations. They also suggest that middle managers face major challenges in the organization-wide implementation and adoption of CI including possible resistance by middle management itself. There has, is and probably always will be discourse around middle management and its role in organizational change, where the debate generally evolves around whether middle management can be seen as a strategic asset for change or a blockage to change.