“Landing in the middle of the status hierarchy actually makes us less original. When [psychology researchers] asked people to generate ideas, their output was 34 percent less original after being randomly assigned a middle-manager role than a president or assistant role. In another experiment, merely thinking about a time that they were in a middle-status role caused participants to generate 20-25 percent fewer ideas […] than thinking about being in a high-status or low-status role.”<\/p>\n
-Adam Grant, Originals<\/em>\u00a0(p. 84)<\/p>\n I suppose “death by middle management” is basically\u00a0clich\u00e9 at this point.\u00a0But normally\u00a0I just hear people joking about it. It occurs to me now that middle managers are a good\u00a0case study for examining the problems with traditional\u00a0management\u00a0hierarchies, because middle\u00a0managers are subject to the stresses both of trying to please\u00a0those above and<\/em> trying to be responsible for those below. (To put it another way, the system gives them less than one-person’s-worth of power, yet more than one-person’s-worth of responsibility.)<\/p>\n The way I interpret the experiment’s results above is that\u00a0being in a power hierarchy\u00a0at any<\/em> level stifles creativity, but middle\u00a0managers receive\u00a0a double dose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Landing in the middle of the status hierarchy actually makes us less original. When [psychology researchers] asked people to generate ideas, their output was 34 percent less original after being randomly assigned a middle-manager role than a president or assistant role. In another experiment, merely thinking about a time that they were in a middle-status … <\/p>\n