People are rewarded for how they behave, but what do middle managers get for their behavior at work? In this article, we draw upon socioanalytic and role theories to linking competencies, personality, and organizational rewards among a sample of middle managers. The goals of this study were (a) to identify a motive-based competency structure and (b) to understand the antecedents and consequence...

Enabled by the development of information technologies, telecommuting and telework have been incorporated into organizations for around 30 years. However, there still exists resistance to this work arrangement, particularly from middle-level managers. Formal knowledge about how to manage telework is needed to keep the managers better informed. I conducted a qualitative exploratory study to inve...

Theoretical developments in the analysis of organizations have recently turned to an “organizational becoming” perspective, which sees the social world as enacted in the micro-context of communicative interactions among individuals through which meaning is negotiated. According to this view, organizational change is endemic, natural and ongoing; it occurs in every-day interactions as actors eng...

The systems engineering process often begins somewhere in the middle of a project. Naturally, the systems engineering process should be different for a project where systems engineering starts in the middle versus a project where it starts at the beginning of the project. This article presents a consensus of senior systems engineers and project managers at the Idaho National Engineering and Env...

This article in progress aims to understand the role of culture in the way middle managers promote Information Technologies (IT) and technological change. To gain new insights, this paper presents an approach of change and of culture based on the theory of the strategic actor of Crozier and Friedberg (1977). In this view, how and to what extent middle managers promote IT in the workplace is ass...

Often managers spot a chance to do something valuable for their company, but for some reason, they cannot get started. Even if they begin the project, they give up when they see the first big hurdle. The inability to take purposeful action seems to be pervasive across companies. Managers tend to ignore or postpone dealing with crucial issues which require reflection, systematic planning, creati...

Middle managers play a crucial role in ensuring that the activities inside an enterprise are well-coordinated, that employees act responsively and responsibly, and that the organization continuously generates creative alternatives to grapple with its problems. Further, it is at the middle level that the organization's policies and strategies get translated into decisions and actions. However, i...