中层管理者多重角色行为对企业绩效影响的实证研究

中层管理者是企业管理中重要的一个环节.本文关注中层管理者多重角色行为对企业绩效的影响.首先,将中层管理者的多重角色划分为企业家、执行者、辅导者与协调者四个维度；其次,通过结构方程模型,实证性的验证了中层管理者多重角色行为模型及各个角色维度对组织财务绩效与运营绩效的不同影响.结论表明中层管理者企业家角色行为仅对企业财务绩效具有积极影响,其余三个角色行为仅对企业运营绩效具有积极影响.最后,分析讨论研究结论,并给出相应的对策和建议.

Empirical Research on the Impact of Middle Manager's Multiple Role Behaviors on Firm Performance

Roles of middle managers in corporations have been a controversial topic.Researchers have not reached an agreement concerning what roles middle manager play and have limited investigation of the topic in Chinese context.This paper employs SEM method to explore the structure of middle managers’ role behaviors,and discuss impact of those role behaviors on different dimensions of corporation performance.We categorize middle managers’ roles into four categories: entrepreneurship,executive,coach and coordinator.Roles of entrepreneurship are important to organizational development because they are related to middle managers’ ability to make decision and their leadership behaviors.Executive role focuses on effective use of all kinds of recourse by middle managers to achieve organizational goals. On one hand,the role of coordinator emphasizes on middle managers’ marginal resources to deal with the gap between strategic plans and real condition.On the other hand,this role requires that middle managers unify understandings of top managers and first-line managers via communications.The role of coach focuses on middle managers’ ability to guide subordinates’ work,smooth their emotions,and deal with their problems. Many studies show that middle managers’ role behaviors are positively related to firms’ financial performance.However,a few studies focus on studying firms’ comprehensive performance.This paper employs financial and operational performance to manifest firms’ comprehensive performance,and previous study focuses on economic outcomes while our study focuses on internal operational efficiency.Based on prior research,a hypothesized model is proposed to study middle managers’ role behaviors and firms’ performance.All four kinds of role behaviors would be positively related to firms’ financial and operational performance. Data was collected from MBA,MPA and other part-time students in Xi’an Jiaotong University from 2006 to 2009,and only those acting as middle managers at that time were chosen to make sure that evaluations were reliable.A total of 297 surveys were sent and 283 were returned,of which 225 were valid.Our survey was created based on studies of Floyd and Wooldridge(1992,1997),Huy(2001) and Stewart(1994),and used 17 items to measure middle managers’ role behaviors,such as"take charge of one’s responsibly","put emphasis on performance","willing to take risk" and "transform organizational target into employees’ targets." A firms’ financial performance is measured with indicators,including the growth of sales,market shares,average profits and mainly customs.A firms’ operational performance is measured with indicators,such as whole executives,cooperation among departments,information’s transition,conference decision implement and communicating channel.We adopted the exploratory factor analysis(SPSS) to analyze the collected data.Fit indices of hypothesized model are also better than those of two competing models,one with the mediating effect of operational performance between role behaviors and financial performance,and the other adding the relationship between financial and operational performance to hypothesized model.Conclusions show that middle managers’ role behavior of entrepreneurship is important to financial performance.Therefore,firms should put more emphasis on the impact of middle managers participating in the decisions making process,and collecting strategic information,instead of serving as simple and mechanical door keepers. Firms should also focus on the contribution of middle managers to operational performance through executive,coach and coordinator,which occupy middle managers’ works and indirectly improve financial performance.The findings of this paper indicate that more general conclusions would be gotten with more diversified samples,and exploration of relationships among role behaviors would be helpful for future research.Future research can improve the generalizability of this study by including more diversified samples,and exploring relationships among role behaviors.