Simultaneously Leaders and Followers: The being of Janus.
Location
1053
Format Type
Event
Format Type
Paper
Start Date
January 2018
End Date
January 2018
Abstract
Scholars have provided abundant research concerning Middle Managers. That research often focuses on a middle manager’s roles as a leader, follower, or manager in the context of an application or business. Different literary perspectives from a diversity of cultures add to our understanding of the middle manager experience. Well known theories have emerged from research such as the leader-member-exchange (LMX) theory, implicit leadership theory (ILT), and implicit followership theory (IFT) that help us understand the interrelated nature of cognitive, tacit, or explicit expectations. However, it is rare to find research concerning middle managers that explores their hierarchical dyadic perspectives and rarer to envision what it must be like for them to embrace leadership and followership roles simultaneously. The Roman god Janus, with two faces, symbolizes this potential conflict. In this article, we reveal this middle manager Janus-like role-simultaneity through the lived experiences of nine middle managers and reveal unexpected findings about how some middle managers view themselves making decisions to lead or follow. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), our findings revealed six themes of acquiescence, balance, communication, self, empathy, and expectation as middle managers struggle to balance dissonance contributors. Prominent sources of dissonance appeared to be the middle managers’ self-schemas and cognitive prototypes. In this paper, we dive deeper into the theme of acquiescence, the cognitive state where these sources of dissonance may be resolved, thus enabling middle managers’ endogenous and exogenous behaviors to emerge.
Simultaneously Leaders and Followers: The being of Janus.
1053
Scholars have provided abundant research concerning Middle Managers. That research often focuses on a middle manager’s roles as a leader, follower, or manager in the context of an application or business. Different literary perspectives from a diversity of cultures add to our understanding of the middle manager experience. Well known theories have emerged from research such as the leader-member-exchange (LMX) theory, implicit leadership theory (ILT), and implicit followership theory (IFT) that help us understand the interrelated nature of cognitive, tacit, or explicit expectations. However, it is rare to find research concerning middle managers that explores their hierarchical dyadic perspectives and rarer to envision what it must be like for them to embrace leadership and followership roles simultaneously. The Roman god Janus, with two faces, symbolizes this potential conflict. In this article, we reveal this middle manager Janus-like role-simultaneity through the lived experiences of nine middle managers and reveal unexpected findings about how some middle managers view themselves making decisions to lead or follow. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), our findings revealed six themes of acquiescence, balance, communication, self, empathy, and expectation as middle managers struggle to balance dissonance contributors. Prominent sources of dissonance appeared to be the middle managers’ self-schemas and cognitive prototypes. In this paper, we dive deeper into the theme of acquiescence, the cognitive state where these sources of dissonance may be resolved, thus enabling middle managers’ endogenous and exogenous behaviors to emerge.
Comments
My dissertation research informs my proposed article for this conference. In my dissertation based on an IPA methodology, I cited and heavily depended upon Professor Jonathan Smith’s work. I was one of the early adopters at the University of Phoenix to use IPA. My Committee Chair, Dr Lynne Devnew is proposed to be my co-presenter and will be presenting her paper at the conference. I have been following IPA via Dr. Smith’s IPA Interest Group. It would be my honor to meet Dr Smith and participate in the TQR conference.