Micromanagement - Causes

Causes

The most frequent motivations for micromanagement, such as detail-orientedness, emotional insecurity, and doubts regarding employees' competence, are internal and related to the personality of the manager. Since manager-employee relationships include a difference in power and often in age, workplace psychologists have used models based on transference theory to draw analogies between micromanagement relationships and dysfunctional parent-child relationships, e.g., that both often feature the frequent imposition of double binds and/or a tendency by the authority figure to exhibit hypercriticality. However, external factors such as organizational culture, severe or increased time or performance pressure, and instability of managerial position (either specific to a micromanager's position or throughout an organization) may also play a role.

In many cases of micromanagement, managers select and implement processes and procedures not for business reasons but rather to enable themselves to feel useful and valuable and/or create the appearance of being so. A frequent cause of such micromanagement patterns is a manager's perception or fear that they lack the competence and creative capability necessary for their position in the larger corporate structure. In reaction to this fear, the manager creates a "fiefdom" within which they select performance standards not on the basis of their relevance to the corporation's interest but rather on the basis of their division's ability to satisfy them.

Such motivations for micromanagement often intensify, at both the individual-manager and the organization-wide level, during times of economic hardship. In some cases, managers may have proper goals in mind but place disproportionate emphasis on the role of their division and/or on their own personal role in the furtherance of those goals. In others, managers throughout an organization may engage in behavior that, while protective of their division's interests or their personal interests, harms the organization as a whole.

Less frequently, micromanagement is a tactic consciously chosen for the purpose of eliminating unwanted employees: A micromanager may set unreachable standards that he then invokes as grounds for termination of those employees; these standards may be either specific to certain employees or generally applicable but selectively enforced only against particular employees. Alternatively, the micromanager may attempt by this or other means to create a stressful workplace in which the undesired employees no longer desire to participate; when such stress is severe or pervasive enough, its creation may be regarded as constructive discharge (also known in the United Kingdom as "constructive dismissal" and in the United States as "constructive termination").