A Psychological Perspective on Middle Managers' Strategic Championing Behavior

Organizations rely on middle managers’ championing novel strategic initiatives to provide a much needed competitive edge. Existing literature on championing focus on structural conditions regarding whether or when managers fulfill the championing role, and neglect managers’ individual motivational drivers for championing. Integrating goal orientations theory and team contextual factors, we develop and test a cross-level model which proposes that individual differences in goal orientations may motivate managers to search for or avoid new strategic initiatives, and that individual motivational orientations flourish in different intra- and inter-team contexts. Based on data from 194 senior middle managers in 28 teams of a Fortune 500 company, we found that learning and prove goal orientations affect championing behavior positively, whereas avoid orientation has a negative effect. At the team level, behavioral integration (intra-team context) is positively, and the procedural fairness of the strategy making p...