A psychological perspective on middle managers’ 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-team contexts. Based on data from 181 middle managers in 26 teams of a large company, we found that learning and prove goal orientations affect championing behavior positively, whereas avoid orientation has a negative effect when the team is not behaviorally integrated