To Be and Not to Be: The Middle Management Paradox and Resistance Escalation Process During Transitions to Self-Managing Organizations

Self-managing organizations (SMO) constitute a radical attempt to avoid hierarchical control and manager–subordinate authority relationships by suppressing them outright. For existing organizations, transiting to SMO poses significant challenges, especially for middle managers who became ‘architects of their own demise’. Combining 38 interviews, direct observation over 4 years, and secondary data we show in this paper that SMO transitions expose middle managers to a paradoxical situation that led them to engage in an escalation process of resistance that culminated in the subversion of the SMO experiment. These results contribute to SMO studies by documenting transition difficulties and the middle management paradox. Our study enriches knowledge on middle managers resistance in post-bureaucratic organizational forms by documenting the boundary conditions that allow the transition from individual to collective hidden and then collective, overt, and transformative forms of managerial resistance.