The seductive version of self-management goes like this. Remove the managers, push decisions down to the people doing the work, and unleash the motivation that hierarchy was suppressing. It is a good story and half of it is true. The half it leaves out is that authority is a tool, and a tool in untrained hands does not produce craftsmanship. It produces a mess, and often a demoralized one.
This is the quiet failure mode behind a lot of disappointing agile adoptions and flat-organization experiments. Leaders confuse granting autonomy with building the capacity to use it. They are not the same act, and the gap between them is where good intentions go to die.
Self-management raises the skill bar
The clearest statement of this comes from the competency research. Doblinger (2022) reviewed 84 studies on what individuals need to perform in self-managing teams and built the findings into a model of knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics that connect individual capability to team performance and to members' own wellbeing. The premise is stated plainly and it is the opposite of the seductive story: self-management improves performance only if the members are competent to navigate a self-managed system.
Two competencies stand out in that work. The first is self-leadership, the ability to set your own direction, manage your own motivation and hold yourself accountable without a supervisor supplying the discipline. In a hierarchy, a manager does a great deal of invisible work here. Remove the manager and that work does not vanish. It transfers to the individual, who may never have been asked to do it before. The second is interpersonal skill, the ability to coordinate, negotiate and resolve conflict with peers who hold no authority over you and over whom you hold none. Hierarchy resolves disagreements by escalation. Self-management asks people to resolve them directly, which is a harder skill that few were ever taught.
The gains were never automatic
If competence is the hinge, we should expect self-managing teams to show inconsistent results in the wild, strong where the capability is present and weak where it is not. That is exactly what the broader review finds. Magpili and Pazos (2018), surveying the self-managing team literature, report that despite wide adoption the evidence on whether these teams actually raise performance is inconsistent. The variance is not noise. It reflects whether the right inputs, across individual, team and organizational levels, were in place. Autonomy handed to a team without the individual competence to wield it is one of the inputs most often missing.
The agile research agrees from its own angle. Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe (2025), reviewing how agile teams reach effectiveness, treat autonomy as an enabler rather than a guarantee, one factor among several including shared leadership and the emergent states a team develops over time. Autonomy is necessary in their account and nowhere near sufficient. A team can be fully empowered and still ineffective if it lacks the coordination skill and shared understanding that turn authority into results.
Abandonment wearing the mask of empowerment
The practical danger is that abandonment and empowerment look identical on a slide. Both involve a manager stepping back and a team taking on decisions. The difference is everything that surrounds the handoff. Empowerment comes with training in self-leadership, with coaching on peer coordination, with time to develop the shared states that Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe (2025) identify. Abandonment comes with a reorganization announcement and a wish of good luck.
This has a sharp edge in the current climate. When organizations flatten to cut cost, as many have through recent layoffs, they often describe the result as empowerment. The managers are gone, so the teams must be autonomous. But nobody built the competence the autonomy requires, and Doblinger (2022) is explicit that the competence is the precondition. What the team experiences is not freedom. It is being handed a harder job with the support removed and the label changed.
The practical read
If you are going to give a team authority, budget for the capability to use it. Doblinger (2022) tells you what to build: self-leadership and interpersonal skill, deliberately, not by hoping people pick it up. Magpili and Pazos (2018) warn that skipping this is why self-managing teams so often underdeliver. Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe (2025) remind you that autonomy is one enabler among several and cannot carry a team alone. Empowerment is not a subtraction. It is a substitution, and the thing you owe the team in exchange for the manager you removed is the competence to manage themselves. Skip that exchange and you have not empowered anyone. You have abandoned them and called it agility.
Sources
- Doblinger (2022). Individual Competencies for Self-Managing Team Performance: A Systematic Literature Review. Reviews 84 studies and shows self-management improves performance only when members hold self-leadership and interpersonal competencies. https://doi.org/10.1177/10464964211041114
- Magpili and Pazos (2018). Self-Managing Team Performance: A Systematic Review of Multilevel Input Factors. Finds the performance evidence for self-managing teams inconsistent, depending on whether the right inputs are present. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496417710500
- Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe (2025). Understanding how agile teams reach effectiveness: A systematic literature review to take stock and look forward. Treats autonomy as one enabler among several, not a sufficient condition for effectiveness. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2024.101056