Return-to-office mandates and tighter budgets tempt leaders to centralize control. At the same time, employees ask for more autonomy and meaning. Into that tension step the loudest stories about bossless companies. Some point to Buurtzorg’s nurse-led model as proof that you can run big without managers. Others recall Zappos’ retreat from holacracy and say the experiment is over. Both miss the point. Self-management is a design choice that can fit some work very well. It is not a religion.
What self-management actually is
Self-managing organizations radically and systematically decentralize authority across the enterprise, and their defining feature is the elimination of the classic manager–subordinate relationship (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). The idea is not the absence of structure. It is a different structure that locates decision rights with those doing the work and builds formal mechanisms to coordinate without bosses.
Why make such a move at all? A broad synthesis of management research argues that conventional hierarchy performs reliably when the tasks are known and the environment is stable, yet tends to become rigid and to reinforce status differences that can stifle development and cross-functional problem solving (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). In other words, hierarchy is a strong technology for repeatable execution. It is a weak one for problems that spill across boundaries and change faster than a chain of command can react.
The classic case, with the right caveats
If you need proof that scale without middle managers is possible, the Dutch home-care provider Buurtzorg supplies it. As of January 2021 it operated more than 900 self-managing teams of up to 12 nurses and had about 14,700 employees, with only two directors, roughly 50 people in the back office, and no middle managers or supervisors (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The coordination load is handled by 21 internal coaches who support roughly 950 teams, about one coach for more than 45 teams, and these coaches have no formal authority and no responsibility for team productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The economic story is a study in nuance. A KPMG analysis reported in the academic case put Buurtzorg’s overhead at 8 percent versus a sector average of 25 percent, a figure from around 2015 that should not be read as current (Martela and Nandram, 2025). At the same time the cost per hour was higher than peers, €54.47 versus €48.74, a reminder that lower bureaucracy does not automatically mean lower unit cost (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Most important, the authors flag boundary conditions. The model works best when interdependence between teams is low, frontline professionals are skilled and motivated, and services can be delivered in relatively self-contained units with clear local accountability (Martela and Nandram, 2025). That is guidance for where to try this first, not a promise that any business can drop managers and thrive.
The counterexample, and what it really says
Zappos was the most prominent firm to embrace holacracy in the 2010s, and by 2016 it was the largest company to have implemented the system fully (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016). The public debate around it polarized quickly into cheerleading and doom-saying, which those authors urged executives to avoid in favor of a more balanced view of what self-managed teams could and could not do (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016).
Then the backlash came. In March 2015, CEO Tony Hsieh issued an ultimatum to commit fully to holacracy or take a buyout, and 18 percent of employees chose to leave. By 2017 Zappos had replaced holacracy with an internal market system in which teams operated like small businesses with their own P&Ls, brought managers back, and eliminated many of the system’s more bureaucratic meetings, moves triggered by business performance challenges and the critique that holacracy turned attention too far inward (Groth, 2020). Treat this not as a verdict on self-management in general, but as evidence that structure must match strategy and market context. If your governance model consumes scarce attention without improving customer outcomes, you will change it.
What the people data say about well-being
A common critique of bossless models is that they increase stress, that in the absence of a manager the burden of coordination and decision making burns people out. Fresh correlational evidence from Finland complicates that claim. Using validated scales that distinguish organizational self-management from individual self-management, researchers found both were positively related to work engagement and negatively related to burnout across two samples: 425 employees in multiple organizations and a nationally representative sample of 2,000 people (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). Part of the relationship operated indirectly through job demands, which suggests that how work is structured mediates the experience of autonomy (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). These are associations, not causal proof. They do indicate that well-designed self-management is compatible with, and may support, healthier workplaces.
How to make it work in the 2020s
The lesson from the research and the cases is practical. Start where the work fits, not where the ideology is loudest.
- Match the model to interdependence. Where teams can deliver value with limited cross-team coupling, push decision rights to the edge. Where interdependence is high, invest first in better cross-boundary routines before flattening roles. This follows the boundary conditions observed at Buurtzorg (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
- Replace bosses with explicit mechanisms. Publish decision rights, escalation paths, and simple rules for who decides what. Self-management is not managerial vacuum. It is a different way to hold people accountable to peers and to customers, consistent with the formal decentralization described by Lee and Edmondson (2017).
- Build coaching capacity without authority. Create internal coaches who support capability and resolve friction but do not own performance, mirroring Buurtzorg’s use of a small cadre of non-directive coaches at scale (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
- Watch the human signals. Track engagement and burnout alongside delivery metrics. The Finnish evidence links self-management to healthier scores, though the data are correlational, which makes them useful as early warning and learning indicators rather than targets (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025).
- Avoid all-or-nothing rollouts. Zappos’ experience shows that sweeping shifts can trigger attrition and unintended bureaucracy. Pilot in bounded domains, learn, and iterate, a stance consistent with the balanced reading urged in the contemporary review of self-management debates (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016) and with the theoretical cautions about fit from Lee and Edmondson (2017).
The practical implication is simple. In environments where problems are novel and cross-functional, formal, organization-wide decentralization can improve adaptability and human energy. In environments where work is predictable and tightly coupled, hierarchy still does what it was built to do. The leaders who will get value from self-management in this decade are not the ones who promise to abolish bosses. They are the ones who redesign the work and the coordination system to fit the reality of the task, then scale what proves itself on the ground.
Sources
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines SMOs and synthesizes when hierarchy helps or hinders complex, cross-boundary work. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype. Reports the polarized debate, notes Zappos as the largest holacracy adopter at the time, and urges a balanced assessment. https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype
- Martela and Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Documents large-scale self-management, dated overhead comparisons, higher hourly costs, and key boundary conditions. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Groth (2020). Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy. Details the 2015 ultimatum with 18% buyouts, the 2017 shift to an internal market with managers reintroduced, and the reasons for the pivot. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy
- Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen (2025). Self-management and employee well-being: validated scales, engagement and burnout. Shows correlational links between organizational and individual self-management with higher engagement and lower burnout across two Finnish samples. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23409444241307734