Middle managers and the environment: the perspective of the purchasing and supply function

Management literature and practice increasingly recognise that middle managers can make an important contribution to organisational success. For this, they often utilise a boundary-spanning role, which gives them access to knowledge held by external stakeholders. In order to distil factors that hamper or aid middle managers in contributing to organisational success, this study examined one subgroup of middle management with a salient boundary-spanning role, namely purchasing and supply chain managers and their involvement in environmental initiatives in the supply chain. The results of our study, however, contrast with the literature on middle managers generally, as the purchasing and supply chain managers were found to deliver a suboptimal environmental performance across key areas of managing supply. Such a conclusion has important repercussions for the literature on middle management as it calls for more attention to the conditions the individual manager is working under rather than generalising across this hugely diverse group.