Getting things done by middle manager

Much research has been conducted on the role of the middle manager; however, most of the studies in research on this topic have focused on the middle manager’s managerial work. However, upon surveying 2,183 managers at Japanese firms, we found that 87% of managers were actually engaged in nonmanagerial work. Furthermore, in extreme cases where middle managers responded that there was either not enough or too much non-managerial work, team performance was poor, while in cases where middle managers did an appropriate amount of nonmanagerial work, team performance was good.


Introduction
Middle managers play a key role in linking the top and bottom levels of an organization (Harding, Lee, & Ford, 2014). Because of this, much research has been done on the role of the middle manager from a number of approaches. These aspects include boundary work (Azambuja & Islam, 2019), routine creation (Yamashiro, 2019), sensemaking (Balogun & Johnson, 2004;Rouleau & Balogun, 2011), and strategic roles (Mantere, 2008). These studies all focused on middle managers ' managerial work. 1 In truth, however, some middle managers also perform the same type of non-managerial work as their team members at the same time that they do their managerial work. In this paper, "non-managerial work" refers to the general work that is usually done at the workplace by team members to enable the team to maximize its performance and achieve its goals. Managerial work and non-managerial work are considered different in nature (Mintzberg, 1973;Sheel & Vohra, 2016), which is the reason for which some team members do not necessarily succeed as managers when they are promoted because of their non-managerial work performance (Sato, 2015).
A middle manager is a person who has been assigned subordinates within a firm and leads that team as their main performance evaluator. This paper seeks to identify the impact of non-managerial work done by middle managers by surveying middle managers at Japanese firms. The survey found that most managers actually perform both managerial work and non-managerial work; that team performance is poor in extreme cases when the amount of nonmanagerial work performed is either too little or too much; and that team performance is good when the middle manager is doing an appropriate amount of non-managerial work.

Research and Data
For our data, we used the Recruit Works Institute's Survey of Management Behavior (2019). This survey targets company managers. The actual survey, which was subcontracted to a survey company, took the form of an online questionnaire. Survey subjects were those who met all of the following criteria (a)-(c): (a) Is a full-time employee (b) Currently works for a company that has at least 100 employees (c) Is currently in a managerial position that is equivalent to a section head, with the responsibility of reviewing the performance of one or more subordinates The survey was administered in March 2019. Surveys were sent to 3,129 people, 2,183 of whom responded. Of the 2,183 respondents, 96.3% were male and 3.7% were female. In terms of age, 2.6% were in their 30s or younger, 41.3% were in their 40s, 52.5% were in their 50s, and 3.6% were in their 60s. In addition, the breakdown by sector was led by manufacturing at 32.7%, followed by finance & insurance at 13.9%, data communications at 11.1%, and wholesale & retail at 10.0%. Other sectors in all comprised less than 10% of responses, the largest of which was services at 8.4%. As for job type, 35.4% were in planning and management, 29.1% were in sales, 17.1% were in technology and research, 7.7% were in systems engineering, 5.1% were in production, and 5.6% were in other areas.
Team performance was measured as the average of the following seven items ranked on a 5-point scale.
1. Our team is judged by our boss to be working efficiently.
2. Our team is praised by our boss for performing well. 4. The subordinates whom I have trained are promoted quickly. 5. Our team is rated by our boss as generating stable output.
6. I am often entrusted with training new employees and midcareer recruits.
7. Our team is rated by our boss as being active in generating innovation. Only 13% of middle managers were doing management work exclusively; 87% of middle managers were doing their assigned work in the workplace; and some of them were even spending 80% or more of their time on non-managerial work.

First
Next, why are middle managers spending time on non-managerial work? To find out the answer, we asked the following question. We prepared 10 choices and allowed multiple responses.
Q: Why do you perform "playing work" (work that is the same as what is performed by your subordinates)? Please mark all that apply from among the following items.
The findings are shown in Figure 2.
The most frequent answer, given by 57.3%, was that the team has a lot of work to do, which means that the manager has to do both Figure 2. Reasons for non-managerial work managerial work and the same work as their team members. The next most frequent answer, given by 37.3% of respondents, was that the team is not big enough. This was followed by 30.3% saying that the manager has to do non-managerial work so that the team meets its performance goals. Thus, the middle managers are trying to boost their teams' performance by doing the same work that their team members do, in addition to managing them. The next most frequent responses were that doing non-managerial work contributes to the development of team members (19.8%) and that doing nonmanagerial work allows the middle manager to try out new ways of working (14.9%). Thus, we can surmise that in addition to helping their teams achieve their performance goals, middle managers do non-managerial work to help develop their subordinates or to try out new ways of doing the job. managers spend on non-managerial work, their teams' performance, and the size of their teams.
In addition, from Figure 3, we can see the following. First, the proportion of time that middle managers spend on non-managerial work is less when the team is large and more when the team is small. Next, looking at the relationship with team performance, we can see that overall, the more time a middle manager spends on nonmanagerial work the worse the team's performance. However, team performance does not necessarily get better when the middle manager is doing only managerial work. Team performance is best when middle managers are spending 20%-30% of their time on nonmanagerial work.

Discussion
It seems that the role of a middle manager is to improve the team's performance by managing the members of the team. However, in most Japanese firms, many middle managers do the same work that their subordinates do, in addition to their own managerial work, and in terms of team performance, middle managers who do some non-  (Sato, 2015).
Second, although in Figure 2, 19.8% of respondents said that they did non-managerial work to develop their subordinates, the connection between non-managerial work done by managers and personnel development is that it constitutes an important learning opportunity for team members when they can learn by watching how their manager does the job. However, it must be noted that if it gets to the point that middle managers are doing so much non-managerial work that they are taking over team members' jobs, the team members will be left with the tasks that are hardest for them, thereby leaving them with no opportunity to learn from experience.
However, the survey findings expose some problems at Japanese firms. As the reason given for doing non-managerial work by 57.3% of respondents in Figure 2, when there are fewer team members than required to handle the volume of work, middle managers have to spend more time doing non-managerial work, and this tendency seems to be stronger at workplaces that impose short-term work quotas. Hence, the truth is that there is so much work that the middle manager is not spending enough time on managerial work. In particular, as shown in Figure 3, the tendency is that the larger the proportion of non-managerial work the smaller the team. This indicates the possibility that the organization was already mired in problems with human resources allocation before the middle manager decided to act. For example, if middle managers cannot spend enough time on managerial work, they lose the chance to improve their own management skills by building experience as middle managers, and this has a negative impact on the firm over the long term.