What Middle Managers Do in Local Government: Stewardship of the Public Trust and the Limits of Reinventing Government

Abstract

The most serious resistance to teamwork and participatory management often comes from middle managers, not unions. If employees are making decisions and solving problems, middle managers become superfluous. Too often they stand in the way of actions, because their instinct, to justify their existence, is to intervene (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992; 265). Middle management in most organizations really has little role beyond make activities, such as stopping ideas coming down and stopping ideas going up. Middle managers...are a sponge (former United Airlines President, Ed Carlson, quoted in Peters & Waterman, 1983; 313). Eliminating layers of middle management through contracting out for services and flattening organizations has become accepted catechisms of the modern management faith. It is a faith that is constantly being kindled in the public sector by recurring waves of administrative self-doubt. Some of this self-doubt results from financial pressures to save money by getting rid of costly layers of the organization. Other sources of self-doubt include various organizational and human resource management theories, such as TQM, theory Z, and project team management, which argue that employee ownership, satisfaction, and productivity will be increased if those who produce the service/product have more direct responsibility for managing the conditions of their success (Peters & Waterman, 1983; Cohen & Brand, 1993; Scherkenbach, 1990). More recently, administrative self-doubt in the public sector has been fostered by the call to reinvent government. One of the underlying assumptions of the reinvention movement is that the need for middle managers as well as direct service providers will be less as government abandons its role of rowing in favor of steering (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992; 265 ff.). Like most successful catechisms, these external sources of administrative self-doubt have served to reify the assertions about the useless, costly, and even dysfunctional role middle managers are seen to play in modern organizational life. As middle managers and former middle managers, we are both perplexed and concerned that so little serious attention has been given to what middle managers actually do, especially within the public sector. On the basis of our 80 years of combined experience in the public sector, representing more than a dozen different local government organizations, we do not believe that it is accurate to characterize middle managers as superfluous, hour-glass bottle necks, or make featherbedders.(1) In defending the role of middle managers in this article, we do not wish to quarrel with the obvious need to eliminate unnecessary layers of an organization or the need to increase organizational efficiency and effectiveness through more employee involvement and team management. Middle managers in some organizations have received some bad publicity for some very good reasons. We agree that the traditional corporate hierarchy has tended to reward employees based on the number of individuals they supervise, thus creating excessive competition and expansion at the middle management levels of public as well as private organizations. However, we do not believe that the solution to the problem is to be found in a wholesale attack on the middle-management structure of public organizations. We focus our attention in this article on the role of middle managers in local governmental organizations. While our case observations are drawn from our experience at the local government level, we also believe these functions are performed by public managers in large-scale bureaucratic organizations at both the state and federal levels of government. We first summarize what we believe are the essential generic functions middle managers perform in local levels of government. Contrary to much of the current thinking, we argue that the work is generic to the success of almost all organizations. …