The Boundary Spanning Leadership Practices of MMs in Leading Change
Drath et al. (2008) assert that there are three elements to make leadership happen: (a)
direction: agreement on what the collective is trying to achieve; (b) alignment: effective
coordination and integration of the different aspects of the work so that it fits together in
service of the shared direction; and (c) commitment: people who are making the success of
the collective (not just their individual success or the success of the leader) a personal
priority. McCauley (2014) reminds us that while the top management may have the direction,
alignment, and commitment (DAC) in leading organizational change, the organization in
general may not have come to that moment of DAC or leadership; it may only be happening
at the top but not in the middle or at the bottom of the organization. To make leadership
happen, the top management needs to firstly gain the support and collaboration of MMs.
Then, however difficult it may be, the lower levels of people in the organization must be
involved to form the community of practice for leading organizational change. When the
whole organization can see the reality of the external business environment and the need for
organizational challenges, and mobilize the appropriate responses to change, leadership is
truly happening (Tichy, 1997). The organization is ready to accomplish the change or
leadership outcomes.
Boundary spanning leadership, according to Ernst and Chrobot-Mason (2011), is the
capability to create DAC across group boundaries in view of the common vision or goal of
the organization. It begins with a new way of looking at and working with vertical,
horizontal, stakeholder, demographic, and geographic boundaries within the multinational
corporation organization structure. The “nexus effect,” that is, desirable business results that
the organization could accomplish as a whole instead of through their parts or groups, can be
accomplished by consistent leadership practices among the managers and the members of the
teams (Ernst & Chrobot-Mason, 2011, p. 238). The six practices to create the nexus effect
include: buffering (creating safety), reflecting (fostering respect), connecting (building trust),
mobilizing (developing community), weaving (advancing interdependence), and transforming
(enabling reinvention; Ernst & Chrobot-Mason, 2011, p. 13). In my study, I will look into the
actual leadership practices of MMs to see whether they have applied those six practices of
boundary spanning leadership in leading change, or indeed whether others emerge from the
particular organizational and cultural contexts.
Boundary spanning leadership theory provides an empirically based practice model of
leading organizational change which is useful for MMs to manage conflicting demands from
different stakeholders. While they are dealing with highly complex and political relationships,
the six practices could help create the nexus effect which could be brought about not only by
the efforts of the leaders, but by the involvement of all the varying groups within the
organization. It focuses on the continuous actions that the leaders and the teams need to
undertake under the diverse tensions and conflicts that arise during organizational changes.
I will draw on the concepts and practice of adaptive leadership theory (Heifetz, 1994;
Heifetz et al., 2009; Heifetz & Linsky, 2002) to understand what MMs need to do in
managing change or adaptive work, and boundary spanning leadership theory (Ernst &
Chrobot-Mason, 2011) to see how MMs deal with the complicated relationships and
conflicting demands in complex organizations and the business environment of MNCs. In the
next section, I will explore how leadership as practice could be understood as a response to
the process and time, that is, more specifically, how leadership is emerged in the leadership
moment (Ladkin, 2010).
The Leadership Moment
The leadership moment emerges when the team or the community of practice has come
to a common understanding of the meaning of reality and the purpose of the organization;
they interact and work together with commitment and collaboration towards that shared
direction (Ladkin, 2010). More specifically, applying the leadership moment concept to
organizational change situation, it is like the consensus or awareness or consciousness when
leadership is happening in the team during the organizational change. It could happen when a
MM is doing the visioning with the team to help them understand the vision for change. One
may also find such a leadership moment when a MM is motivating them to move on with the
company or when a MM is communicating with the team about some challenges encountered
in the change process.
A fictional account illustrates this point about leadership moment. In the movie Saving
Private Ryan, the Captain, acted by Hanks, was commissioned to go into the enemy territory
to look for Private Ryan because the State Department decided that he should be sent home
so that his mother would not have four sons die in the same battle. The Captain, as a middle
manager, did not inspire the team with a vision and mission; he did not give any speech or
orders to motivate/force the team to follow him. The Captain tried to manage the conflicts
and to make sense of the mission while they continued to adapt to the challenges that were
presented to them. The individual soldiers had their own goals and values, and they obviously
could not agree with the mission. The administrative leadership of the US Army had given
the order and they could not refuse or run away.
The role of the MM was to foster the cohesion of the team and to direct them to the
immediate goals in front of them (small changes) while they continued to carry out their
mission. At one critical moment, the Captain finally shared about his vision for the mission.
He told his team that he was a primary school teacher before he joined the army and that he
just wanted to go home to see his wife after the war. The team listened to their Captain, and
they decided to follow him until the end. They were learning and working together to fight
the battles. They were fighting for each other to survive and win the battles. The whole team
adapted and moved to carry out their ultimate mission—to win the war for their people.
Through all of these interactions, the leadership moment emerged.
Process perspectives suggest that the organization is constituted by the interaction
processes among its members and that this interaction is fluid, ongoing, evolving, creative
and without any definite endpoint (Langley & Tsoukas, 2010; Langley et al., 2013; Tourish,
2014). The implications for practice, according to Tourish (2014), include the following:
• The context in which leadership is practiced is critical.
• Leadership is inherently complex, contradictory, iterative, adaptive, and contested.
There is no one right way to lead or follow, and no universal set of competencies
or behaviors to adopt.
• There needs to be more emphasis on the role of followership as opposed to an
infatuation with leadership.
• Leaders and members of the organization need to embrace uncertainty and
renounce their mutual quest for discursive closure seeking for stability and
harmony. This means that they all need to accept that ambiguity and conflict are a
part of the processes of all organizational life and change. (p. 93)
Different departments and people could perceive and experience organizational
changes differently, and thus in my study, I will consider their contextual and situational
factors which may affect their leadership practices. I will also observe and examine the
interactions and dialogues among MMs and their stakeholders inside the organization in the
light of the above process and group dynamics. In the following section, I will look for
empirical findings from leadership and management studies about the practices of MMs in
leading change.
Empirical Findings of Leadership-as-Practice of MMs
I have reviewed the three major sources of literature (middle manager and collective
leadership, change management theories and processes, and leadership-as-practice theories)
to explore the leadership-as-practice of MMs in MNC settings under the Asia Pacific context.
From a subjectivist ontology, humans are very much involved in shaping practices, and
researchers study the meanings that people give to the mundane everyday work in which they
are engaged (Cunliffe & Hibbert, 2016). It is in the daily routine that people live out their
meanings and practices instead of some special moment of leadership. Moreover, the
leadership concepts that MMs know may not necessarily be the same as what they practice.
Therefore, I will review the LAP empirical studies on the actual practice of middle managers
in leading organizational changes.
Based on the foundational literature review and analysis of the three sources of
knowledge, I searched for empirical studies that apply those frameworks to research on
leadership-as-practice of MMs in organizational changes. Most of the leadership research had
been conducted among top leaders and middle managers during the normal business
operations, trying to study the relationship between leadership and general leadership
effectiveness, behavioral complexity, team interaction, team identification, and
entrepreneurship (Chang et al., 2017; Edwards & Gill, 2012; Hooijberg, 1996; Kearney &
Gebert, 2009; Kim & Vandenberghe, 2018; Lehmann-Willenbrock et al., 2015; Michaelis et
al., 2010). Only a few studies have examined leadership behaviors of MMs in change
management (Binci et al., 2016; Feng et al., 2016).
Moreover, most of those studies were quantitative, applying assessment tools to
measure leadership qualities or behaviors to draw correlations between variables under study.
Some research has studied middle managers’ involvement in the process of strategic planning
(Collier et al., 2004) and sense-making of middle managers in change management (Raes et
al., 2007). The research articles do not address what MMs should do particularly in relation to
their teams, top management, peer managers, and other stakeholders in the external business
environment for leading organizational change. Pointedly, little research has been done in Asia
based on leadership-as-practice theory about MMs.
Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003) conducted a case study of managers in a large,
international knowledge-intensive company and they suggested from their findings a
rethinking of leadership, taking the mundane, almost trivial, aspects of what managers
actually do, seriously. They further asserted that leadership, after all, might not be so
necessary when the managers were working with highly competent knowledge workers.
Moreover, the managers did not exhibit those typical leadership behaviors that many writers
wrote about. Instead, the managers were simply listening, talking to people, and to some
extent not doing much leadership work from the traditional leadership paradigm. They,
however, admitted that the situation might only apply to a knowledge-intensive company
where most of the engineers and knowledge workers were very autonomous and competent to
do their work, and thus, they preferred to be left alone.
Alvesson and Jonsson (2018) had similar observations when they were conducting a
case study on a middle manager in an international manufacturing company. They found that a
manager’s understanding of leadership may or may not guide practice, because leadership
practices (attempts) can vary, be divisive, and that a manager’s advocacy efforts are driven by
a multitude of different, partly opposing, forces, which may in turn “decouple” ideas and
behavior in leadership practices.
Paroutis and Pettigrew (2007) studied the actual practices of strategy teams in a FTSE-
100 multibusiness firm, through a longitudinal case study with 36 interviews. Their
findings showed that both actions and interactions of corporate center and business unit
strategy teams are important during the strategy process. Moreover, the acting and knowing
of those teams was dynamic, collective, and distributed within the multibusiness firm across
two interrelated levels: within the team and across teams, each involving both recursive and
adaptive activities. The definitions of practices used by strategy teams during strategizing
include: executing (the strategy team undertakes day-to-day, routine activities), reflecting (the
strategy team reflects on and modifies past ways of conducting (or not conducting) strategy),
initiating (the strategy team initiates or shapes new ideas about changes in the content and
process of strategy), coordinating (the strategy team leads and controls the activities of other
teams or managers), supporting (the strategy team provides strategy knowledge and resources
to other managers or teams), collaborating (the strategy team jointly develops strategic
reports and ideas across organizational levels), and shaping context (the strategy team
changes the contextual conditions within which other teams strategize; Paroutis & Pettigrew,
2007, p. 110).
Stensaker and Falkenberg (2007) conducted a longitudinal study on a large Norwegian
oil company undergoing corporate-wide change. The change initiative could be described as a
business process reengineering initiative. The change was applied to three business units, and
the researchers were studying response and activities in the business units related to the
corporate change initiative in a period of six years (1996–2001). They traced organizational
responses to change over time (by transforming the organization, by loose coupling and
making symbolic changes, by customizing the change to better fit the context, or by
corrupting the change and reinforcing status quo among the three business units. They found
that responses to change initially varied across business units, but over time most
organizational changes were customized to fit the business unit context. Most importantly,
they argued that organizational-level responses and how those responses developed over time
could be explained by examining individual’s interpretative responses, that is, sense-making
of the corporate change initiative.
Fairhurst (2007) pointed out that while discursive approaches to leadership are varied,
the common thread is that they all take a social constructionist stance. That is, they focus on
the process of leadership and the communicative construction of leader (and follower)
identities in interaction (Clifton & Dai, 2020). The leader, from such a social constructionist
perspective, is the manager of meaning because it is he/she who has most influence in the
process of constructing organizational reality, and so authors the organization and those who
inhabit it (Clifton, 2014; Raelin, 2007). Being (identity) affects the meaning making of the
leader as well as the team and organization (Alvesson, 2010; Alvesson & Karreman, 2007;
Carroll & Levy, 2008). On the other hand, the programming of the culture, organization, and
team also impacts on the leader’s sense-making and identity (Alvesson & Robertson, 2016).
Harding et al. (2014) explored the identity of the middle manager using focus groups of
middle managers from England’s National Health Service (NHS) discussing their work. The
methodology of the study was qualitative, interview-based, single case study containing
multiple mini-cases. The study involved two stages: interviews with the senior management
teams of 34 constituent organizations of the NHS and focus group discussions with middle
managers in six of those organizations. The selected middle managers were responsible for
implementing many changes imposed by the Department of Health. The subject of discussion
was about the implementation of a talent management strategy required by the Department of
Health in 2004. The group size of those six focus groups ranged from three to five middle
managers. Discussions lasted 60–90 minutes, were recorded and then transcribed verbatim.
Their empirical data showed that middle managers were engaging in primarily three
discourses: (a) conformist/managerialist, that is, conforming to instructions about how to
implement strategy, (b) critical/managerialist, that is, agreeing with the strategy but
disagreeing with the way it is being implemented, and (c) critical/resistant, that is, critical of
the whole strategy and voicing opposition to its implementation (p. 1220). They concluded
that the middle managers were taking on both controller/controlled and resister/resisted
identities in managing organizational change. In my study, I will also observe the discourses
of MMs with their top management and their team members, instead of whether those
identities are adopted by them. Moreover, I will explore how they balance those tensions
brought about by the complex relationships in MNCs and dialogue with their team members
and within themselves.
Azambuja and Islam (2019) recognized the ambivalence of middle managerial work in
coping with conflicting expectations and frustrating demands in organizational hierarchy.
They applied the concept of boundary work, characterized as “the work of negotiating
between multiple roles in the interstices of organizational groups” (Azambuja & Islam, 2019,
p. 534). They used organizational ethnography as their research approach to observe the
lived experience of MMs of a Brazilian accounting firm in their ambivalent experiences of
agency and instrumentalization in everyday experience. The context of the ethnographic
study was the daily work lives of middle managers, with an emphasis on their interactions
with top managers and subordinates in formal (e.g., meetings and training sessions) and less
formal (e.g., everyday work and lunchtime) conversations and situations. The researcher also
used shadowing and interviews to collect data about the middle managers’ boundary work
and reflections. There were all together 12 MMs being observed and interviewed. The
number of interviews with those managers ranged from six to 24.
Azambuja and Islam (2019) found that MMs described themselves as proactive and
reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on
the other. They examined the forces of boundary work in terms of emancipation (that is,
sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment, and reflexivity) and alienation (that is, fatigue,
lack of self-determination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). The study
concluded that MMs routinely shifted between being agential and reflexive mediators
(boundary subjects) and interfacing and coordination devices (boundary objects) (Azambuja
& Islam, 2019, p. 558). Azambuja and Islam’s organizational ethnography research inspires
me to use shadowing and interviewing with MMs in reflexivity and sensitivity in the
processes of their interactions and dialogues with their bosses, peers, and team members.
I have summarized the empirical findings of the LAP and related theories studies in
Table 2.1. In Table 2.1, the studies were categorized according to their theories, concepts,
identities (if applicable), and practices as findings. Heifetz and Linsky’s (2002) study drew on
the adaptive leadership theory, whereas Drath et al. (2008) had boundary spanning leadership
as theoretical origin. The majority of the other empirical studies were based on LAP theories.
The concepts developed from the studies were very much based on their theoretical origins
and epistemological assumptions. Some studies focused more on identities (Alvesson, 2010;
Alvesson & Karreman, 2007; Alvesson & Robertson, 2016; Azambuja & Islam, 2019; Carroll
& Levy, 2008; Clifton & Dai, 2020; Fairhurst, 2007; Harding et al., 2014), whereas others
