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While leadership is one of the most discussed concepts in the social sciences, there is a need for more scholarly research that examines the ambiguous leadership position of middle managers, and how their leadership work is perceived in practice. In this article, we follow the recent research turn of adopting a social constructionist view of leadership, and make use of metaphors to answer the following research question: how are middle managers in the public sector managing the expectations and demands from both top management and subordinates, and what are some of its consequences? We study this in the public sector, a context of particular importance but one that has often been neglected in previous research. Through a qualitative in-depth case study, based on observations, interviews, and organizational documents, our findings show that middle managers were trapped in the way they moved between being constructed as a leader and a follower, along what we call a leader-follower pendulum, and in the way they enacted two different leadership metaphors: the buddy and the commander. These aspects jointly contribute to a complex and ambiguous situation for middle managers, which in turn gives rise to alienation and the constant strive to fit in, something that we metaphorically refer to as “karma chameleon.”

Karma chameleon: Exploring the leadership complexities of middle managers in the public sector