Self-caught in paradox: Middle Managers' agentive construction of powerlessness

Description

Leadership agency, defined as "the ability to take action" (Tourish, 2014: 80), is central to leadership practice (Nohria and Khurana, 2010; Willis, 2019). However, our understanding of middle managers' agency remains limited and controversial. Mainstream literature often portrays leaders as powerful agents with full autonomy (Tourish, 2014), while critical perspectives highlight how middle managers are constrained by their "sandwiched" position between top management and frontline employees (Mintzberg, 1989; Gjerde & Alvesson, 2020). This position requires middle managers to navigate pressures from multiple directions, manage information flows, and maintain legitimacy while protecting subordinates (Gjerde & Alvesson, 2020). Critical literature reveals that middle managers' agency is deeply entangled with structures and power relations within a hierarchical space (Harding et al., 2014). Consequently, a paradoxical picture emerges of middle managers as both powerful leaders and subordinate, controlled actors struggling with their identity (Thomas & Davies, 2005; Harding et al., 2014). As Harding (2014: 391) argues, leaders are simultaneously "powerful and powerless," subjected to and subjectified by their position. We argue that this apparent paradox reflects an under-complex view of middle managers' agency aiming in this empirical paper to examine how middle managers' agency emerges through complex relational dynamics during organizational change.
To unravel the complexity, we adopt a process-oriented, discursive, and performative understanding of leadership and power inspired by the post-structuralist interpretations of Foucault and Butler (2010). In this perspective, language and agency are intertwined, with speech acts serving as performative actions that both reflect and constitute social realities and power structures. We analyze 1430 text segments from 25 interviews with middle managers in a critical situation of change, extending Harding et al.'s (2014) pronoun analysis by incorporating syntactic agentivity to provide a more granular examination of agency and power.
The results of our linguistic analysis including an extended pronoun analysis (Harding et al., 2014) reveal two different discourses: (1) The discourse of agency where the middle managers can agentively position themselves as subjects and objects when talking about situations within the hierarchical space, (2) and the discourse of paralysis where our results show how the same managers are stuck in their own discourse and thus actively constitute their own inability to act. They discursively struggle over agency when they find themselves in positions that are outside the scope of hierarchical space.
Our results move beyond simplified dichotomies of powerful versus powerless leaders to examine the complex ways that agency emerges through leadership practice. This allows us to better theorize how middle managers navigate their position between autonomy and constraint.
This paper makes three key contributions. First, we demonstrate that leadership agency is situational and contextual (Collinson, 2014), not merely an individual managerial capability. Second, our findings reveal how middle managers actively constitute their own constraints through their performative practices. Third, we illuminate how power relations become performative within middle managers discourse, enabling certain forms of changed agency while hindering others.

Period	18 Mar 2025
Event title	Bath Paradox PDW
Event type	Workshop
Location	Bath, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International