Scientists say middle managers are more likely to be anxious and depressed

You might reasonably believe that employees toward the bottom of the workplace hierarchy are the least happy and healthy.

Compared to their bosses, they typically make less money and have less authority to determine how they do their work.

Yet new research complicates the idea that any amount of power is better than none. According to the study, led by Seth J. Prins, a doctoral student at Columbia University, middle managers may in fact be the worst off. Relative to their superiors and subordinates, employees in these roles experience the highest rates of depression and anxiety, his research found.

The study looked at nearly 22,000 full-time workers who participated in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Researchers divided those workers into four groups: owners, or self-employed people who earned over $71,500 a year; managers, or those in an executive role who had at least a college education; supervisors, or those who had less than a college education; and workers, or those in blue-collar roles like farming and manufacturing.

Results showed that supervisors and managers had the highest rates of both anxiety and depression. Supervisors had a 19% rate of depression and managers had a 14% rate, compared to 12% for workers and owners. As for anxiety, supervisors had an 11% rate and managers had a 7% rate, compared to 5% for owners and 2% for workers.

Prins and his coauthors have a few theories about why middle management is such a stressful place to be. The paper cites research suggesting that people who don't have a lot of authority to make decisions but still face a lot of external demands show higher rates of depressive symptoms.

That sounds exactly like the position a middle manager would find herself in. For the most part, she's unable to challenge orders from high-level executives, and she's constantly juggling competing requests for her attention from above and below.

"Middle managers probably get that perfect mix of having high demands but not a ton of decision-making authority in order to enforce those demands," Prins says. "So it's this idea of getting pulled in both directions, from the top and the bottom."

Moreover, the authors speculate that middle managers often have no one but themselves to blame for their professional mistakes. A worker could point to external forces like his inept manager as the reason why he's unsuccessful. But among middle managers, every misstep might seem like the result of an inner failure.

"It could be that workers who have subpar working conditions may say, 'That's not our fault; that's the boss's fault,'" says Prins, "whereas middle managers maybe ... see that as sort of a personal failing."

Prins is hesitant to offer suggestions for individual organizations or managers, since this study drew its findings from a huge sample of Americans. Yet perhaps one takeaway is that more money and power doesn't necessarily come with greater happiness.

For the sake of our own psychological well-being, it may be better to operate without much autonomy or with total autonomy - rather than be stuck somewhere in the middle.