A familiar story explains why self-management is rare in Latin America: the region is too hierarchical, too deferential to the boss, too fond of the strongman at the top of the org chart. It is a tidy cultural explanation, and the available data suggests it is looking in the wrong place. The obstacle is less about attitudes toward authority than about the structure of the labor market itself.
The workforce is willing, and mostly checked out
Start with how people actually feel about work. Gallup (2026) reports that 30 percent of employees in Latin America and the Caribbean were engaged in their jobs, using 2025 data, which is low by the standard any manager would want but not obviously worse than much of the world. More striking is the wellbeing picture. Gallup (2026) finds that 56 percent of the region's workers were thriving in life, the highest level in more than a decade, and that regional wellbeing sits among the highest globally even as engagement stays subdued.
That combination matters for the cultural argument. A workforce that is thriving in life but disengaged at work is not a workforce that lacks the capacity for autonomy. It is a workforce whose energy is not being captured by the way work is currently organized. Self-management, at its core, is a bet that people given real authority over their work will invest more of themselves in it. A region with high wellbeing and low engagement is, if anything, sitting on exactly the latent motivation the model tries to unlock. Culture is not the binding constraint that story implies.
Gallup (2026) is careful to frame the regional wellbeing as among the highest in the world while engagement remains mostly low, and that mismatch is the interesting signal. In a purely cultural story you would expect low engagement to travel with low wellbeing, a workforce ground down and resigned. Instead the region looks like people who are doing well in their lives and are simply not being asked, at work, to bring much of that vitality to bear. The gap is an organizational design failure dressed up, too often, as a cultural fact.
The structure is the real problem
The binding constraint shows up in a different dataset. The International Labour Organization (2025), in its labor overview for Latin America and the Caribbean, reports that informality reaches roughly one in every two employed people, a regional average near 47 percent in 2025, and that this figure barely moved from the year before, falling only about 0.7 percentage points. The same report notes a labor force participation rate around 63 percent, employment near 60 percent, and unemployment around 6 percent, one of the lowest levels in fifteen years, with informality falling disproportionately on women and young people.
That 47 percent is the wall. Self-management, as documented in the strong cases, presupposes a formal organization to redistribute authority within. Martela and Nandram (2025) describe Buurtzorg redesigning employment relationships, budgets, and hiring inside a formal Dutch employer. Hamel (2011) describes Morning Star's colleagues negotiating written agreements within a formal American company. Neither model has any purchase where half the workforce operates informally, without an employer, a contract, or an organization whose internal governance could even be reorganized. You cannot flatten a hierarchy that was never formally built. The precondition for redistributing authority is having an organization that holds it in the first place.
Where the opportunity actually lies
Read together, these two facts point to a specific, unglamorous conclusion. The ILO (2025) informality figure and the Gallup (2026) engagement and wellbeing figures are macro labor-market indicators, not measurements of self-management, and this piece treats them as context rather than proof of anything about bossless companies. But as context they reframe the strategy. The interesting frontier for self-management in Latin America is not persuading a supposedly hierarchical culture to loosen up. It is the formal sector, where the raw material is unusually promising: a large base of workers who are thriving in life yet under-engaged at work, exactly the people a well-designed self-managing structure is meant to activate.
The ILO (2025) numbers sharpen the picture in a way the engagement debate usually ignores. With participation around 63 percent, employment near 60 percent, and unemployment around 6 percent, one of the lowest readings in fifteen years, the region does not have a shortage of jobs. It has a shortage of the kind of formal, organized employment that self-management presupposes, with informality falling hardest on women and young workers. A low unemployment rate can hide the fact that nearly half of those working do so outside any organization whose governance could be redesigned at all.
For a regional executive, the practical read is twofold. First, do not accept the cultural excuse. The Gallup (2026) wellbeing numbers undercut the claim that the workforce cannot handle autonomy. Second, aim the experiment where it can actually take hold, inside formal firms with the scale and stability to redesign how authority flows, rather than treating self-management as a universal solvent for a labor market where informality is the dominant reality. The models that Martela and Nandram (2025) and Hamel (2011) document are formal-sector models. In a region where the formal sector covers little more than half the workforce, that is precisely where the leverage, and the limit, lies.
Sources
- Gallup (2026). State of the Global Workplace, Regional Data (Latin America and the Caribbean). Reports 30% engagement and 56% thriving for the region, the wellbeing-versus-engagement gap central to the argument. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697850/state-of-the-global-workplace-regional-data.aspx
- International Labour Organization (2025). 2025 Labour Overview of Latin America and the Caribbean. Documents ~47% informality, ~63% participation and ~6% unemployment, the structural barrier the piece identifies. https://www.ilo.org/publications/2025-labour-overview-latin-america-and-caribbean
- Martela, F. and Nandram, S. (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Shows self-management operating inside a formal employer, the precondition informality removes. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Hamel, G. (2011). First, Let's Fire All the Managers. Morning Star as a formal-sector self-managed firm, reinforcing that these models presuppose a formal organization. https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers