Most executives who would never sign off on a "bossless" reorganization have already run one. They called it an agile transformation. Squads, sprints, product owners instead of project managers, teams that decide how to do their own work: strip away the vocabulary and much of it is self-management wearing a delivery methodology's clothes. That relabeling matters, because the research on why agile teams succeed turns out to be research on the same conditions the self-management literature keeps naming, and companies that ignore the overlap tend to get the rituals without the results.
The rebrand no one announced
Agile started as a way to build software and spread into a general theory of how teams should work. A systematic literature review of how agile teams reach effectiveness makes the underlying claim explicit: effectiveness depends on principles of self-management, not merely on the ceremonies and rituals teams perform (Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe, 2025). The review synthesizes the enabling factors and they read like a self-management checklist: autonomy, shared leadership, coordination, and the team's emergent states (Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe, 2025). An agile team granted real autonomy over its work, sharing leadership rather than routing everything through one lead, is functionally a self-managing team. The methodology is the delivery wrapper. The engine is self-management.
This is why so many agile transformations disappoint. Organizations adopt the visible artifacts, the stand-ups and the boards, while leaving authority concentrated where it always was. The review's point is that the ceremonies are not the mechanism. The self-management principles are (Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe, 2025). Run the rituals without the autonomy and you have theater. The stand-up still happens, the board still fills with cards, and yet nothing about who really decides has changed, which is why so many transformations feel busy and stall at the same time.
Same enablers, same failure modes
Once you see agile as self-management, the self-management literature stops being an exotic reference and becomes directly relevant. A systematic review of self-managing teams organizes what drives their outcomes into three nested levels, individual, team, and organizational, linked to results through processes and emergent states, and it is candid that despite wide adoption the performance evidence is inconsistent (Magpili and Pazos, 2018). That inconsistency is the agile experience too. Some squads soar and some flounder, and the difference is rarely the framework. It is whether the input factors the review names are actually present.
The individual level is where this bites hardest. A systematic review of individual capabilities in self-managed teams starts from a hard premise: self-management improves performance only if members are competent to navigate it, with self-leadership and interpersonal skills standing out (Doblinger, 2022). Anyone who has watched an agile rollout has seen this. A team of people who can prioritize, negotiate scope, and hold each other to account thrives on the autonomy. A team without those capabilities experiences the same autonomy as chaos and quietly recreates a manager to escape it. The framework did not fail. The conditions it assumed were missing.
Why the framing changes what you do
Calling agile what it is has practical consequences. If agile were mainly a set of ceremonies, the way to fix a struggling team would be to run the ceremonies better. If agile is mainly self-management, the way to fix a struggling team is to attend to the conditions self-management requires: real autonomy, the right individual competencies, coordination mechanisms, and the emergent states that let a team govern itself (Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe, 2025; Magpili and Pazos, 2018; Doblinger, 2022). Those are different interventions entirely. One tweaks the process. The other builds the capability and the authority that make the process work.
It also clarifies why agile does not travel uniformly. The self-management research is consistent that outcomes depend on multilevel input factors and are not automatic (Magpili and Pazos, 2018). Agile is not a guarantee of performance any more than removing a boss is. It is a bet that a particular team, in a particular kind of work, with particular capabilities, will coordinate better on its own. Sometimes that bet is well placed. Sometimes it is not, and no amount of sprint discipline will rescue it.
The practical read
If your organization has run an agile transformation, you have already committed to self-management, whether or not anyone said so. So judge it by the self-management evidence. When a team struggles, resist the reflex to add more process, and check the conditions instead. Does the team hold genuine authority, or only the appearance of it? Do its members have the self-leadership and interpersonal competencies the model assumes (Doblinger, 2022)? Are the coordination mechanisms and emergent states in place that the input-factor research says outcomes depend on (Magpili and Pazos, 2018)? Agile that works is self-management with a delivery vocabulary. Agile that fails is usually self-management attempted without its conditions. Naming the bet is the first step to placing it well.
Sources
- Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe (2025). Understanding how agile teams reach effectiveness. Argues agile effectiveness rests on self-management principles rather than ceremonies, and names autonomy, shared leadership, coordination, and emergent states as enablers. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2024.101056
- Magpili and Pazos (2018). Self-Managing Team Performance: A Systematic Review of Multilevel Input Factors. Organizes outcome drivers into three nested levels and shows performance is inconsistent and dependent on input factors. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496417710500
- Doblinger (2022). Individual Competencies for Self-Managing Team Performance. Establishes that self-management improves performance only with competent members, highlighting self-leadership and interpersonal skills. https://doi.org/10.1177/10464964211041114