Analysing Middle Managers: Identity Work in a Greek Context

ABSTRACT

After a period of unprecedented restructuring and downsizing in organizations, middle managers found themselves in the heart of these changes and they were exposed to an increasingly destabilized working life world, full of threats and uncertainties. This phenomenon attracted immediately the attention of researchers and many studies tried to explore the actual effects on middle managers and predict their future role within organizations. Adopting a social constructionist approach, this study will move beyond the popular functionalist approaches and the pressure to find the ‘truth’ about middle management and it will focus on how middle managers make sense of themselves as managers and people and how they construct their identities. Using semi-structured interviews from 10 middle managers in the private sector in Greece, the findings reveal the frustration the interviewees experience and the tensions that are evident in their attempts to shape their identities and make sense of their lives. The case of Greece has proven to be very interesting and peculiar and the research findings contribute to the knowledge about middle managers with reports from a country that is outside the dominant Anglo-American sphere, offering at the same time some useful information to the Greek literature, since this topic is under-researched in Greece. 

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