Roles, Middle Managers

The Middle Manager and Change

Middle managers became increasingly responsible for developing and controlling departmental policing philosophy during the early eras of policing. This continued into the professional era (characterized by reactive, incident-driven methods with emphases on qualitative outcomes such as number of calls for service, arrests, and so on), where they became the principal managers who developed policies and procedures for their organizations, interpreted communications efforts between upper management and supervisors and beat officers, and provided operational leadership for the various functions.

These characteristics put middle managers in a unique circumstance of influencing innovation and change, both positively and negatively. The negative influences have been documented in police literature quite well because of the obvious impact to organizational innovation. The problem that middle managers have with organizational change is that they often perceive threats to their jobs, whether real or imagined. It is not the specific innovation that they resist so much as the potential for loss to their power base and a decrease in the amount of discretion they have in performing their various roles. As a result, they tend to filter information from the top and resist new ideas. In doing so, they manage to limit the implementation of different police philosophies, strategies, and other techniques that would change the status quo of the organization and, consequently, their jobs.

The process of change, while originating at the top, must be an inclusive effort that engages all employees of the department as well as stakeholders in the community. Innovative practices, such as community policing and problem solving, need to be developed at the local level, include the input and feedback of all employees, and be implemented in a manner that is least influenced by those who would resist it. However, it is precisely the middle [Page 368]managers’ unique circumstance that allows them to be a positive influence on this implementation process. Instead of the middle managers becoming bottlenecks in the communications process, they have the strong potential to be conduits that allow information to flow freely. Lieutenants and captains work closely with first-line supervisors and beat officers, and because of this they have strong working relationships with the officers and may provide a positive view of the changes that come with community policing. Instead of filtering information, they become the information channel for the rest of the department to access for answers.

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