Middle Managers and Dilemmas in the Organisation

Abstract

Middle managers, it turns out, can assist a business in implementing significant changes and achieving its vision and goals by facilitating top management’s communication with lower managers or subordinates. This study aims to analyse bibliometric measures relevant to middle managers and dilemmas by examining publishing trends, delving into information about the trending of authors’ keywords, probing into conceptual evolution, and determining future research directions for this subject using the Scopus database. This study uses three bibliometric software to analyse the bibliographic data: ScientoPy, VOSviewer, and SciMAT. Over 56 years, this study found that publication growth is minimal, with the number of top publications being 32 in 2020. Scopus bibliographic databases depicted the United States as the most active country, with 114 publications co-authored by authors from the United Kingdom, Canada, Russian Federation, Italy, and Hong Kong. Denmark has published 29% of the total publications based on the last two years’ publications. The analysis of the authors’ keywords found that “Middle-managers”, “Leadership”, “Middle Management”, “Management,” and “Organisational change” were enumerated in the top five. The keyword “Middle-managers” has a close association with “leadership”, “management”, and “organisational change”. Based on thematic evolution, “Health”, “Anchoring-effect”, “Developing-countries”, “Communication-skills”, and “Health-care” became the newly emerging themes found from 2011 to 2022. In conclusion, this study could contextualise prior research on this subject and build a scientifically sound evidence-based practice paradigm for future research. Also, this study will expand our understanding of middle managers and associated dilemmas.