Remembering Steven W. Floyd's Impact on Middle Management Research

Middle management research has been synonymous with the contributions of Steven W. Floyd and his colleagues. The seminal work by Wooldridge and Floyd (1990), for instance, marked a notable turning point and established the strategic case for middle managers not only as bystanders, but central actors in strategy processes (see also Floyd and Wooldridge, 1992, 1994, 1997). This line of research continues to flourish decades later and Steve enthusiastically joined this Guest Editor team's journey to chart the way ahead for the field. As fellow Guest Editors, we were shocked and saddened by the sudden passing of Steve on 18 October 2022. While colleagues and friends will continue to pay homage to Steve's enduring legacy of research, teaching, service, and mentorship, here we celebrate Steve's centrality to middle management research. The motivation for the special issue built on Steve's work from its inception. To illustrate this intuition, Figure 1 presents a bibliometric visualization of Steve's influence on middle management scholarship since 1990. The visualization provided is not intended to be the definitive mapping of Steve's far-reaching scholarly influence, but a visual way to showcase Steve's impact on middle management research and notable researchers in this space. Different metrics to quantify Steve's impact and tools to visualize Steve's widespread influence on middle management research, all reveal a similar pattern: The field continues to flourish, with Steve's work at its centre. Bibliometric snapshot of Steven W. Floyd's impact on middle management research (1990 – present) Notes: Plotted using Vosviewer tool (https://www.vosviewer.com/). Database constructed by searching Scopus Web of Science for ‘middle manager’ OR ‘middle management’ OR ‘middle-manage*’ OR ‘middle-level manage’* and includes published articles in English in the area of ‘Business, Management, and Accounting’). Extraction window from 1990 (Steve Floyd's first publication on middle managers) to June 2023, resulting in 1961 documents included in the analysis. Analysis specified as citation analysis based on authors, which calculates relatedness based on the times they cite each other. Bibliometric citation analysis based on authors with ≥1 document appearing in dataset AND ≥ 100 citations (209 items meet threshold; map based on connection strength ≥10 [69 items included]). Quantifying Steve's impact tells only a part of the story of his legacy. While the illustration above helps us understand the past, the full impact of Steve on the management community at large cannot be restricted to quantitative interpretations. Accordingly, we reached out to the contributors to the special issue to share how Steve's work influenced their own contributions here. The focal topic of the special issue would not have been possible without Steve's scholarly imprint on the field. Steve's far-reaching influence is evident across the rich methodological approaches, empirical settings, and theoretical approaches covered in this special issue. We asked the contributors to the special issue: How has Steve's contributions inspired and/or influenced the work you have presented in the special issue? Jeanine Porck and Daan van Knippenberg, reflecting on their study of middle managers boundary-spanning through interrelated coordination mechanisms (Porck and van Knippenberg, 2023), note: ‘As a scholar, Steve leaves us with a much richer understanding of the strategy process and the role of middle managers. As an editor overseeing our manuscript, we found him insightful, thoughtful, and developmental in his comments. We are particularly appreciative of his encouragement and advice as we started our journey studying’ behavioural strategy. ‘May both his dedication to the field and to helping (younger) academics continue to impact and inspire the next generation of scholars’. Speaking on Steve's imprint on their study of middle managers' boundary work in an a Brazilian audit firm (Azambuja et al., 2023), Ricardo Azambuja shared with us that ‘[Steve's work] has influenced my thinking in the way his work calls our attention to the ambiguities of middle-managerial work, such as its relevance to both strategy formulation and implementation, its predisposition towards resistance to but also championing of change, its uses of formal and informal channels to influence internal and external actors, and much more. These insights have driven my curiosity, and continue doing so, and for that I am very grateful to Steve Floyd’. Reflecting on their experimental study contrasting top and middle managers' differences in selecting innovation projects (Wilden et al., 2023), Ralf Wilden notes that ‘through working with our MBA students, we recognized that many organizations continue to struggle to adapt to changes in the environment, often driven by radically new technologies and changed demand structures. Interestingly, our students, who are typically middle managers in their organizations, recognized that they have been provided with more opportunities than in the past to make decisions around innovation investments, given their closer proximity to the day-to-day business. That's when we turned to Steve's work, exploring the different decision making of middle managers versus senior managers, which inspired us to explore the role of middle managers in the radical innovation context’. Violetta Splitter, commenting on their study of middle managers' struggles with sense of identity and social agency as strategists (Splitter et al., 2023), shared with us that ‘Steve's work was seminal for understanding the daily work of middle managers and heavily influenced the Strategy-as-Practice community. Middle managers' upward and downward influencing is written large in the fundamentals of middle managers' research as well as novel understandings of middle managers' roles in contemporary organizing (such as in our article on middle managers' roles in inclusive strategy processes)’. In reflecting on their conceptual study of how middle managers navigate career advancement (Gerpott and Van Quaquebeke, 2023), Fabiola Gerpott and Niels van Quaquebeke shared that ‘Steve Floyd's work influenced our research not just based on his findings regarding the critical role that middle managers play in shaping organizations through their upward and downward influence activities. Instead, we were also inspired by his notion that it is not true that “managers are from Mars and academicians from Venus”. As a result, we particularly focused on ensuring that our theoretical model outlining how, when, and why managers engage in Kiss-Up-kick-Down behaviours is both academically rigorous and practically relevant in explaining a prevalent phenomenon in contemporary organizations’. Andrea Greven notes about their study of middle managers' human, social, and cognitive capabilities on product ambidexterity (Greven et al., 2023), that Steve's work drew them to the topic area itself, highlighting that ‘[Steve's] seminal research has sparked our passion for the middle managers' role in organizations which lead to our contribution in this special issue. We thank him for his outstanding achievements and contributions that will gravely shape the future of this field’. Sebastiaan van Doorn, on behalf of the team studying how automation of different functional tasks affects middle managers' involvement in strategy (Van Doorn et al., 2023), notes that ‘we fondly remember Professor Steven Floyd as someone who influentially informed (middle) management literature and practice. Given the rapid proliferation of AI and automation, his seminal contributions, such as Floyd and Wooldridge (1994), Floyd and Wooldridge (1997), Wooldridge et al. (2008) (to name a few), continue to gain in relevance, long since being published. We hope to continue to do justice to his vast legacy as we make modest advances to the grand theory framework he leaves to us. Apart from an outstanding scholar, Steve was an even more outstanding mentor, and he will be dearly missed’. The collection of quotes above provide but a sample of Steve's enduring impact on middle management research. The contributors to this special issue unanimously echo the inspiration drawn from Steve's scholarship. Steve's intellectual legacy in middle management research thus continues to be honoured, in part, through the studies included in this special issue. This short tribute is intended to bookend a wonderful collection of articles on middle managers, through which part of Steve's scholarly legacy lives on. We count ourselves amongst the fortunate who got to experience Steve's expertise, wisdom, and kindness first-hand through working with him. Yet, Steve was more than a member of the editorial team. He has been a wonderful advisor, mentor, and co-author to us and many others. We honour Steve's scholarship here, while we will duly miss the person behind the scholar. He was a generous and warm human being; his soft voice was always welcoming. Steve leaves us with a legacy of a flourishing research field on middle management, to which we are committed to keep it alive. This special issue serves as the first step toward that promise. We thank the contributors to the special issue for reflecting on their work and sharing how Steve has inspired their scholarship. Open access publishing facilitated by Monash University, as part of the Wiley - Monash University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.