Meet Dr. Catherine Deen, a Senior Lecturer in HR and Organisational Behaviour at the School of Business, University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia, whose work helping clarify and demystify micromanagement in leadership, earned the 2023 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Outstanding Dissertation Award presented by the Center for Leadership at FIU.
The term micromanagement has been in the business lexicon since The Economist first explored it in 1975. But for most people, it tends to bring the negative connotation of a meddling, “helicopter” manager. Business and academic literature delve little into the topic, and when they do, they tend to explore its “dark side.”
Dr. Catherine Deen saw an opening. What if she could bring more understanding to micromanagement and help lay the groundwork for future research?
“Micromanagement is one of the most popular yet also most despised topics in management circles,” Dr. Deen stated.
Dr. Deen's dissertation, “My Way or the Highway: Development and Validation of the Micromanagement Scale," helped create a scientific definition and standard for measuring micromanagement. It earned the 2023 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Outstanding Dissertation Award presented by the Center for Leadership at Florida International University.
“Everyone knows or has worked for what they’d call a micromanager. Yet, academic researchers haven’t explored this topic as much as you might expect,” said Nathan Hiller, executive director of the Center for Leadership. “Dr. Deen’s work hopefully sets the stage for understanding the various faces of micromanagement, the causes, and also the remedies.”
Dr. Deen’s work offers theoretical contributions to the leadership literature and the management and organizational behavior literature. Her dissertation, completed at The Australian National University, deepens the understanding of micromanagement, with her work in theory building and testing offers “a novel and significant reconceptualization of prior understandings of micromanagement,” she wrote.
Dr. Deen was drawn to the topic of micromanagement from her 20 years spent in educational leadership. There, she saw “good and bad leadership,” and grew interested in the area of abusive supervisors and of “dark leadership,” she said. Though emerging and considered controversial, micromanagement was understudied in academics with fewer than a dozen empirical papers. Most content was articles or opinion pieces in publications such as Harvard Business Review and Forbes. Why?
"It's just taken for granted. It's a nice term that's easy to understand. It resonates with people and they can connect, she said. That's where I entered the conversation. I saw the opportunity to contribute to something scientific."
After talking with her supervisor and several management leaders, Dr. Deen decided to focus on the creation of her scale model. She would apply academic rigor to deliver “foundational knowledge that hopefully would be good enough for scientists to use later on.”
Traditionally, Ph.D. candidates have faced resistance from those who believe the use of a scale in dissertation research is risky because of the high level of rigor required. Dr. Deen felt she had that covered. Applying skills from her psychological measurement background from her masters, Dr. Deen performed six studies of 1,600 participants over the next four years.
Focusing on the follower's perspective, Dr. Deen produced an empirically-tested preliminary nomological network of the antecedents and consequences of micromanagement. Specifically, she offers evidence and verifies empirically that long-opined negative consequences of micromanagement on follower's attitudes (e.g., dissatisfaction with supervisors, job dissatisfaction), behaviors (e.g., higher turnover intentions, higher job search behaviors, higher supervisor-directed deviance), and well-being (e.g., physical symptoms). Her dissertation addressed these deficiencies by clarifying the construct of micromanagement, developing a psychometrically reliable and valid measure for micromanagement, and verifying a preliminary nomological network of the antecedents and consequences of micromanagement.
The dissertation spanned three phases: Construct definition; item development, content validation and item reduction; and construct validation. Phase 1 defined micromanagement as the unnecessary, excessive, or sustained use of any or a combination of the following managerial behaviors: controlling, close monitoring, or detail focus. The definition was applied in Phase 2, which comprised content validation and determining the dimensionality and psychometric properties of the new scale. Applying the construct definition, 17 items survived content validation. Given the demand for shorter scales, Dr. Deen then reduced the 17-item scale to nine items using the OASIS approach.
To further distinguish and position micromanagement in the current leadership literature, Dr. Deen empirically differentiated micromanagement from other leadership styles such as abusive supervision, authoritarian leadership, participative leadership and initiating structure. Her findings supported the notion that micromanagement is a related yet distinct construct that differs from other leadership constructs.
Among the surprises, Dr. Deen found that while one may expect the performance of the micromanaged workers to drop, the data didn't support that. However, it supported the find that micromanagement was related to negative work attributes, satisfaction, turnover, and poor self-reported well-being outcomes. Further, she said that the quality of leader-follower relationship is associated with lower levels of micromanaging.
“The higher the trust, the lower the micromanagement,” said Dr. Deen, who is next considering exploring another “road less traveled:” the “bright side” of micromanagement or discovering instances when micromanaging may actually be helpful.
"The main takeaway from my preliminary work is the link between micromanagement and negative work outcomes for followers. So far, we are learning that micromanagement has a dark side,” she said. “Still, maybe there is a bright side. We need to tease that out.”
About the writer
South Florida native Jeff Zbar has enjoyed a 30-plus year freelance career as a journalist, editor, author, and marketing copywriter. His portfolio of print and digital work appears in media outlets and for corporate clients across all areas of business and industry.