The recruiter says there are no managers. A 23-year-old hears freedom: no one checking arrival times, no performance theater, no boss. Then the first week arrives and the new hire discovers a written role description longer than any job ad, a peer who wants to negotiate mutual commitments, and a conflict process with named steps. The company without bosses turns out to have more rules on paper than the company with them.
That is not a bait-and-switch. It is the model working as designed. In the academic definition that anchors the field, Lee and Edmondson (2017) describe self-managing organizations as those that decentralize authority in a way that is radical, formal, and systematic, and whose distinctive feature is eliminating the reporting relationship between manager and subordinate. Note what is eliminated: the reporting line, not the structure. When no boss holds the ambiguity, the ambiguity has to be resolved somewhere else, usually in writing.
Expect more explicit structure, not less
The evidence from companies that tried it at scale makes the point concrete. Two years after Zappos adopted Holacracy, the number of formal roles per employee had grown from 1 to 7.4 (Bernstein et al., 2016, cited in Lee and Edmondson's review). Work that a manager used to allocate informally became granular, named, and visible. At Morning Star, the California tomato processor, employees since the 1990s have signed voluntary bilateral contracts (Colleague Letters of Understanding) that define responsibilities, goals, and metrics, renegotiated at least once a year, with elected committees handling pay and conflict.
For a first-jobber this is actually good news. In a conventional firm, the real expectations live in the boss's head and the newcomer guesses at them for months. In a self-managing firm, the expectations are supposed to be written down, which means they can be read, questioned, and renegotiated. The skill that matters is not independence but contracting: making commitments deliberately and renegotiating them out loud.
The person next to you is the system
What replaces supervision is lateral coordination, and it is older than the current wave of bossless startups. As Ricardo Semler has told it, Semco let factory workers choose their own schedules in 1985. Management predicted the assembly line would collapse; instead, workers coordinated among themselves, parents of young children taking mornings, single workers taking evenings. The operative policy was one sentence: talk to the person next to you.
That sentence is a fair summary of what a new hire's day looks like in a self-managing company. Questions that would go up a hierarchy go sideways. This is faster, but it puts a real burden on the newcomer: peers are not paid to develop you the way a manager nominally is, so mentoring must be asked for explicitly. The newcomers who struggle are usually not the ones who lack skill but the ones who wait to be managed.
What it does to you, and what to check before signing
Does the model burn young people out, handing them ambiguity before they have armor? The best quantitative evidence so far points the other way. A Finnish study across two samples (425 employees plus a nationally representative sample of 2,000) found that both organizational and individual self-management were positively related to work engagement and negatively related to burnout (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). The evidence is correlational, not causal, but it undercuts the assumption that structure-by-boss is what keeps workers sane.
The honest caveat is that the label on the door guarantees nothing. Zappos, once the largest company running Holacracy in full, gave employees an ultimatum in 2015 to embrace it or leave; 18 percent took the buyout, and by 2020 the company had quietly walked the system back, restoring managers in practice. A candidate cannot audit ideology, but can audit mechanics. Three interview questions do most of the work: How is a conflict between two people actually resolved here, step by step? Who decides pay, and can anyone see the criteria? What happened to the last person who disagreed with something important?
If the answers are concrete, the structure is real and a first job there will teach self-direction faster than most careers ever do. If the answers are vague, the company has not eliminated bosses. It has only stopped naming them, and a new graduate will spend the first year discovering who they are the hard way.
Sources
- Lee, M. Y. & Edmondson, A. C. (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Research in Organizational Behavior. Canonical definition of SMOs as radical, formal, systematic decentralization that removes the manager-subordinate reporting line; documents Zappos roles growing from 1 to 7.4 per employee and Morning Star's CLOU contracts. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Morikawa, M., Martela, F. & Hakanen, J. (2025). Self-management and employee well-being. BRQ Business Research Quarterly 28. Across two samples (N=425; N=2,000 nationally representative, Finland), both organizational and employee self-management related positively to engagement and negatively to burnout (correlational). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23409444241307734
- Groth, A. (2020). Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy. Quartz at Work. Reports the 2015 ultimatum in which 18% of the workforce took a buyout, and the later retreat from pure Holacracy toward a market-based system with managers back in practice. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy