Leading change from the top
: the impact of top management’s change-enabling leadership on middle managers’ sensegiving performance during organisational change in the German manufacturing industry

  • Peter Schrade

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

Change management literature recognises the positive influence of middle managers’ sensegiving to facilitate change implementation as it addresses employees’ sensemaking needs and fosters a shared understanding of why organisational change is necessary. However, there is little evidence of how top management’s leadership influences middle managers’ sensegiving performance during change. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of top management’s change-enabling leadership behaviours on middle managers’ sensegiving and top management’s perception of the needed and provided change-enabling support during change. The study applied a pragmatic paradigm and an explanatory sequential mixed method approach to conduct research in a sample of 34 organisations in the German manufacturing industry. The first quantitative phase involved a cross-sectional survey among middle managers, which yielded 327 responses. The quantitative results were used to develop the interview guide for the qualitative phase two, which comprised semi-structured interviews with 22 top managers.

The quantitative and qualitative results show that top management’s change-enabling leadership significantly influences middle managers’ sensegiving performance and commitment to change. Moreover, results show that top managers are only partially aware of the needed change-enabling support. While top managers recognise the importance of the needed informational support, they only partially recognise the need for emotional, motivational, and organisational support. A key finding was the lack of emotional support apparent where top managers prefer an affect-neutral task focus to deal with emotions and personal challenges during change. Another key finding was that top and middle managers appeared to have divergent perceptions regarding middle managers’ role, the associated responsibilities and required change competencies, which leads to middle managers not fulfilling their role as sense givers. Furthermore, results show that top managers are largely aware of the provided change-enabling support, which was facilitated by the discussion of the results, the experienced personal challenges and reactions to change. Also, top managers recognised that there is room for improvement, even though many believed that they provided sufficient change-enabling support.

In conclusion, the findings imply that top management needs to address middle managers’ sensemaking to develop middle managers into sense givers. If middle managers can make sense of the change necessity, they commit to it and support it through sensegiving. Beside a shared understanding of the need for change, it also requires a shared understanding of the middle manager role, the associated responsibilities and required change competencies to fully tap the potential of middle managers’ sense giver role.
Date of AwardFeb 2024
Original languageEnglish
SupervisorPaul Humphreys (Supervisor), Martin McCracken (Supervisor) & Desjardins Christoph (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Change management

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