Return-to-office edicts and cost-cutting have revived an old temptation: flatten the chart, trim the middle, and trust that “ownership” will fill the gap. It will not. Autonomy scales when you swap bosses for a backbone, a visible system of roles, decision rights, and shared rules. Without that, the pendulum swings back to hierarchy.
What self-management actually changes
Self-managing organizations decentralize authority in a radical, formal, and systematic way across the enterprise. Their defining feature is the elimination of the manager–subordinate relationship, replaced by governance that locates accountability in roles and teams rather than a chain of command (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). This is not a cultural flourish. It is an operating choice that suits work with high coordination needs and novel problems, where rigid hierarchies often stifle cross-functional problem solving and amplify status differences that hold people back (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
Two implications follow. First, if you want the benefits of self-management, you do not “let go” in the abstract. You specify how decisions get made, by whom, and with what information. Second, you will still need a center, just a thinner one. The question is what that center does.
The thin center that scales
Buurtzorg, the Dutch home-care organization, is the canonical case of a thin center built to support hundreds of self-managing teams. As of January 2021 it had grown to roughly 14,700 employees across more than 900 teams of up to 12 nurses, with only two directors, about 50 people in the back office, and no middle managers or supervisors (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The model relies on a small cadre of 21 internal coaches for approximately 950 teams, roughly one coach for more than 45 teams. Those coaches have no formal authority and are not accountable for team productivity. Their role is to help teams reflect, resolve tensions, and improve their own governance practices (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The cost picture at Buurtzorg is a reminder that “lean” is not the same as “low cost.” A KPMG analysis around 2015 put Buurtzorg’s overhead at 8 percent, versus a sector average of 25 percent in Dutch home care, which points to administrative efficiency. Yet the organization’s hourly costs were higher than peers, €54.47 versus €48.74, reflecting investments elsewhere in the system (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The case also flags critical boundary conditions. The design fits best where interdependence across teams is low, frontline professionals are both competent and intrinsically motivated, and the service benefits directly from local autonomy and judgment (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Translate that to your context before you copy the structure.
The lesson is not that self-management is a magic template. It is that the center trades supervision for services, from coaching to simple shared infrastructure, and that the economics shift. You reduce managerial overhead and add enablement.
What it does to people
A frequent objection is that self-management merely redistributes stress. If teams must govern themselves, will not burnout rise as administrative tasks spread? New measurement work suggests the opposite tendency. Using two separate samples, one of 425 employees and another a nationally representative Finnish sample of 2,000 respondents, researchers validated distinct scales for organizational self-management and individual self-management. Both constructs were positively associated with work engagement and negatively associated with burnout, with part of the effect flowing through changes in job demands (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). The authors are explicit that these are correlational relationships, not causal proof, but the pattern challenges the idea that fewer bosses means more strain. When decision rights and expectations are clear, people appear more energized, not less.
That caveat matters. Outcomes depend on the design. Formal self-management without practical scaffolding can feel like a void. Which brings us to a contemporary cautionary tale.
The Zappos detour
A decade ago Zappos became the largest firm to adopt Holacracy wholesale, and it drew intense attention from champions and skeptics alike (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016). The stakes were real. In March 2015, CEO Tony Hsieh gave employees a choice to fully commit to Holacracy or accept a buyout, and 18 percent took the exit (Groth, 2020). Over the next few years the company pared back the system. It removed many of Holacracy’s formal meeting rituals, brought managers back, and by March 2017 shifted to an internal market model that asked teams to operate as small businesses with their own profit and loss statements and to transact with one another at market-like prices, a response to “big challenges” on business metrics and the critique that the prior system was too inwardly focused (Groth, 2020). By 2020, the company had quietly moved away from pure Holacracy while retaining a few artifacts, such as a circular depiction of hierarchy (Groth, 2020).
Read this carefully. The problem was not autonomy per se. It was a mismatch between the governance mechanics and the company’s needs. An internal market is still a backbone, just a different one from role-centric Holacracy. The public debate tends to polarize into bossless utopia or managerial common sense. The better reading is design fit, which was the thrust of the balanced assessment at the time (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016).
What leaders should do next
If your board wants tighter performance management while your workforce wants flexibility, self-management is not a compromise. It is a choice to make accountability legible without relying on supervisors. Three practical moves follow from the evidence.
- Codify decision rights. Use written role charters, clear meeting formats, and simple escalation rules so teams know who decides what, and when. This is the formal, systematic decentralization at the heart of self-managing organizations (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
- Build a thin enablement layer. Replace middle managers with coaches who advise but do not command, and invest in a small back office that removes friction rather than polices it. The Buurtzorg ratios and coach remit are a concrete reference, with the boundary conditions front and center (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
- Monitor human outcomes. Track engagement and burnout with validated instruments, and treat the signals as design feedback. The link between self-management and well-being is promising but correlational, which means your implementation details will matter (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025).
The deeper message is simple. Autonomy is not the absence of structure. It is structure that pushes authority to where the knowledge lives. Fire the boss if you must. Just make sure you have built the backbone that can carry the weight.
Sources
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines SMOs as formal, systematic decentralization that removes manager–subordinate ties and outlines when hierarchy hinders problem solving. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Martela and Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Documents Buurtzorg’s scale, thin center, coach model, overhead figures from ~2015, higher hourly costs, and boundary conditions. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen (2025). Self-management and employee well-being: validated scales, engagement and burnout. Validates distinct scales and finds positive associations with engagement and negative with burnout, with correlational caveats. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23409444241307734
- Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype. Reports Zappos as the largest Holacracy adopter then and argues for a balanced, design-fit view rather than polarized hype. https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype
- Groth (2020). Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy. Details the 2015 ultimatum with 18% buyouts, removal of Holacracy rituals, return of managers, and 2017 shift to an internal market with team P&Ls. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy