Middle managers’ resistance to strategy implementation: the impact of managers’ shared realities

Although much is known about the impact of middle managers’ cognition on strategy implementation, little is known about the impact of middle managers’ social cognition on strategy implementation. By studying the top-down implementation of a strategy in the plant of a multinational German engineering company using a qualitative approach, we propose a social cognitive model of middle managers’ resistance to strategy implementation. This model shows how middle managers construct shared realities––subjectively experienced commonalities with others’ inner states––about a new strategy based on information that is socially shared by other middle managers during their sensemaking of the new strategy. As the experience of shared realities socially validates middle managers’ negative inner states about the new strategy, middle managers exert cognitive and behavioral resistance to the implementation of the new strategy. In contrast, middle managers who do not experience shared realities but the same negative inner states about the new strategy do not exert cognitive or behavioral resistance to the implementation of the new strategy. Our study contributes to research on strategy implementation by providing a social cognitive explanation for the question why middle managers resist strategy implementation.