”Utan medarbetarna hade jag inte haft en chans att prestera, de är den viktigaste tillgången jag har” : En kvalitativ studie med fokus på hur mellanchefer upplever socialt stöd i sitt arbete

Social support is an important prerequisite for us humans to maintain healthy and rewarding relationships vis-à-vis our work. Further, social support is about giving the individual resources such as encouragement, information and tools which lead to positive health and good work achievements. Previous research indicates that middle managers constitute a professional group of people lacking in resources and support, which makes it difficult for them to do a good job. Additionally, this area of research is not much researched. For these reasons the aim of this study is to narrow the research gap with regard to our understanding of middle managers’ experiences of social support. The empirical data on which the study is based consist of seven semi-structured interviews with middle managers from a specific municipal administration in the municipality of Norrbotten in North Sweden. This study was conducted in close cooperation with the municipality and it was the municipality itself that selected the respondents/interviewees, which admittedly may be a shortcoming of the study. This is explained more in detail in the method section. The results show that the coworkers are a great asset to the social support the middle managers receive, for example by being able to ease the burden and assist the middle managers with new knowledge in their work. Indeed, the support of the coworkers seems essential in providing the middle managers with social support. Also, the results show that middle manager colleagues can be a valuable resource in social support: in the study the middle manager colleagues give each other advice and in doing so they are able to ease the burden of work they experience. However, the middle managers also experience a lack of giving each other feedback. They experience that “negative feedback” is not exchanged between them for fear of it being sensitive. Conversely, “positive” feedback is not exchanged since the middle managers judge themselves bad at praising each other. The results also show that the middle managers all feel trusted by their supervisors, which in turn makes them more confident and allows them to make difficult decisions. Furthermore, the results show that the middle managers feel that there are deficits in social support and they experience a lack of resources, which make it harder for them to carry out certain work tasks. In particular, the lack of resources pertains to skills development in finances, financial systems and HR related matters. Lastly, the middle managers feel that elearning within the municipality is insufficient due to difficulties of learning through this mode of teachin