unfreezeGabriel Lopez

Schubert & Tavassoli (2019), Academy of Management Journal

Product Innovation and Educational Diversity in Top and Middle Management Teams

In Swedish firms, educational diversity in top management teams related to whether firms innovated at all, while diversity in middle management teams related to how successful and novel the resulting product innovations were.

Parts of the Loop it informs

Not tied to one part of the Loop. It describes the middle more broadly.
Read the original paper

Summary written by Unfrozen from the published abstract, then checked twice against the source. Loop coding is exploratory and provisional until an independent human coder checks it. Spot an error? Email [email protected] and it gets fixed.

Related studies

Natarajan et al. (2019)In Indian banks, how rewards and monitoring related to resource allocation depended on whether senior or middle managers were more involved in the decisions, suggesting that incentives that work for one level of managers may do less for another.Gartenberg et al. (2019)Firms whose employees reported both strong purpose and clear direction from management showed higher later performance, and this link was driven by the views of middle managers and professional staff rather than senior executives or hourly workers.Gjerde & Alvesson (2019)Academic middle managers described acting as 'umbrella carriers', shielding their staff from top-management initiatives and information they saw as unnecessary or harmful, a stance tied to identifying more with their profession and staff than with the managerial role.King et al. (2019)In a cross-sectional survey of managers at Chinese acquirers, slower task integration was associated with less employee resistance, and resistance was lower when middle managers were involved in slow human integration and top managers in fast task integration.