Dive Brief:
- It's fairly common for middle managers to mirror the style of senior bosses when they interact with their subordinates.
- Oddly enough, a research report claims that they are even more likely to mimic their senior managers if they sit near them.
- The research, from Erasmus University and Cambridge University, found that middle managers will mirror top management’s bad behaviours, regardless of how ethical they are outside of the office. But this is only the case if they sit near a nasty boss. On the other hand, sitting across the building or on another floor from the big bad boss causes managers to behave more evenhandidly with their staff.
Dive Insight:
The research, which involved five extensive studies gathering their data from a total of 400 business students and professionals, demonstrated that higher level management unfairness can have detrimental effects throughout the organization and it is passed down from high management to middle management, but only if the spatial and social distance is low, according to Dr. Gijs van Houwelingen, co-author of the study.
The researchers added it is vital organizations understand the threats of overly close and highly interdependent relationships between lower and higher management. This is especially because bad behavior among senior members was found, unsurprisingly, to increase employee dissatisfaction and turnover.
It was also found to contribute towards lower organizational commitment among staff. Houwelingen added that managers at all levels must strike a balance between a certain sense of closeness to ensure efficiency, and some sense of distance to ensure that negative top-level behaviour does not spread unhindered through all of an organization's layers.
