Small, Midsize Businesses Hollow Out Middle Management

When Starbucks Corp. decided this month to add at least one full-time assistant manager to every US location it operates, the coffee chain wasn’t just responding to overburdened store managers. It was bucking a national trend.

Middle management is eroding across the US — and not just at large employers like Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., where reducing bureaucracy has become corporate doctrine. The management ranks have also been thinned at small and midsize businesses, where supervisors now have twice as many direct reports on average as they did five years ago, up from roughly three in 2019 to ...