The Changing Role of Managers

This study argues that the increase in middle management in recent decades was accompanied by a major shift in managerial roles. Increased task complexity and a new management philosophy have reduced the need for direct supervision but generated a much greater demand for internal collaboration, leading in turn to the emergence of a managerial class whose primary role is collaboration rather than supervision. To test this, I analyzed a large volume of data, including millions of managerial job postings, a large collection of managers’ resumes, job reviews written by employees, and several unique firm-level datasets. These analyses generated three sets of findings. First, in recent decades, the expectations of the managerial role have quickly changed, in almost all sectors, from supervision to collaboration. Second, this new managerial role is especially concentrated in innovation-focused firms. Finally, firms treating managers as collaborators have a much higher proportion of middle managers than those still treating them primarily as supervisors. Thus, accounting for changing managerial roles could explain a significant portion of the managerial growth in recent decades. Together, these findings suggest that the role of managers has fundamentally shifted and that this change helps explain the growth of the managerial class.