Middle managers and organizational renewal - organizational conditions for agility in innovation work

Research Project, 2019 – 2022

Purpose and goal: The purpose of the project is to identify conditions under which the competences of middle management can be transferred to a new agile form of organization. Companies are pushing decision mandate to the agile self-organizing teams and in this shift, the role of middle management is not clear. But also in an agile organization the understanding of how time, technology, quality and people come together is important. It is a complexity that few others than middle management have spent their time understanding. The question is - how can we take advantage of that understanding? Expected results and effects: The knowledge gap that this project aims to bridge is how organizational conditions can be designed to allow middle managers´ experiences to be used in the establishment of large-scale agile development. The aim of the project is to formulate recommendations to companies that perceive their existing formal roles as obstacles to organizational renewal. This can regard how roles are designed, how leadership training is conducted, how leadership recruitment is implemented, but also how the organization can encourage and rely more on informal roles. Approach and implementation: The project addresses this aim by learning from historically comparable shifts in Swedish industry, and by conducting in-depth qualitative studies based on interviews and observations within the product development organizations of DeLaval and Volvo Cars.