Chapter 4

TMT Sensemaking About Middle Managers

What happens in the boardroom when a top management team (TMT) discusses strategy and makes decisions on how to implement it? And how does a TMT, in practice, deal with questions of how to lead the organization’s middle managers? These questions were the starting point of an in-depth 6-month case study of one TMT, which was reported in Small Group Research in 2007.1 In this chapter, I describe the methods and results of this study in a condensed form and discuss how it is relevant for other TMTs. The aim of this chapter is to illustrate the processes within the TMT that can influence how it deals with middle managers.

In the case study, our research team studied the TMT of a Dutch organization ...

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