One of the most persistent myths about self-management is that it hands people freedom in place of structure. Quiet-quitting debates and return-to-office fights both tend to assume the same thing, that the alternative to a supervised job is an unsupervised one. Inside organizations that have actually removed the manager, the picture is different. The job does not vanish into freedom. It splinters into roles, and holding roles turns out to demand more of a person than holding a job ever did.
The quiet substitution
Self-managing organizations decentralize authority formally and systematically, eliminating the manager-to-subordinate relationship across the organization (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). Notice what that does to the individual's work. In a conventional structure, a job description bundles a stable set of tasks under a title, and a manager resolves ambiguity about what falls inside it. Take away the manager and that bundling has to happen some other way. In practice it happens through roles: discrete parcels of responsibility and authority that people take on, often several at once, and that can shift as the work changes. The title stops being the unit of organization. The role does.
This is not deregulation. It is a different regulatory scheme. Decades of work-design research show that enriching a job by loading it with more autonomy and scope is one of the strongest levers on how people perform and feel. A large meta-analysis found that fourteen work-design characteristics explained, on average, 43 percent of the variance across nineteen worker attitudes and behaviors, with the motivational characteristics that include autonomy accounting for a quarter of the variance in performance and a third of the variance in job satisfaction (Humphrey, Nahrgang and Morgeson, 2007). Roles, done well, are work design turned up: more latitude, more ownership, more scope. The upside is real and measurable. So is the burden.
Roles ask for competencies jobs did not
The burden is competence. A systematic review of individual capabilities in self-managing teams starts from an uncomfortable premise: self-management only improves performance if the members are actually competent to navigate a self-managed system (Doblinger, 2022). Reviewing eighty-four studies, it builds a model of the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics that matter, and singles out self-leadership and interpersonal skills as central to succeeding without a boss (Doblinger, 2022). Those are precisely the capabilities a traditional job could get by without, because a manager supplied them from above. Prioritization, negotiating scope with peers, holding yourself to a standard nobody is enforcing: in a role-based system these stop being nice-to-haves and become the job itself.
That is why swapping jobs for roles is not a free lunch. It relocates work that used to sit in the management layer down into every individual. Some people flourish with that latitude. Others drown in it, not for lack of effort but for lack of the specific competencies the model assumes. An organization that distributes roles without developing self-leadership is setting people up to fail and calling it freedom.
Structure did not leave, it moved
The missing piece is the surrounding scaffolding. A systematic review of self-managing teams organizes the factors that drive their outcomes into three nested levels, individual, team, and organizational, linked to results through processes and emergent states (Magpili and Pazos, 2018). Roles live at the individual level, but they only function when the team and organizational levels are set up to support them: clear ways to allocate and revise roles, shared norms about accountability, and information that lets people make the decisions their roles now require. Strip those away and role-based work degrades into confusion about who owns what.
This reframes a common complaint. When people in a flat organization say they are drowning, the reflex is to question whether self-management works at all. The better question is whether the roles were designed and supported as carefully as a good job description would have been. The evidence is clear that autonomy and enriched work are powerful (Humphrey, Nahrgang and Morgeson, 2007), and equally clear that the power is conditional on competence and structure (Doblinger, 2022; Magpili and Pazos, 2018).
The practical read
If you are moving from jobs to roles, treat it as a design and development exercise, not a liberation. Define roles as explicitly as you once defined jobs, including where their authority starts and stops. Invest deliberately in self-leadership and interpersonal skills, because the research says these are what separate people who thrive from people who founder in self-managed work (Doblinger, 2022). And keep the team and organizational scaffolding in place, because roles are the individual expression of a system that has to hold at all three levels (Magpili and Pazos, 2018). The promise of self-management is not that structure disappears. It is that structure attaches to the work rather than to a chain of command, and that only helps the people who are equipped to carry it.
Sources
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines the formal decentralization that replaces manager-set job boundaries with distributed authority. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Humphrey, Nahrgang and Morgeson (2007). Integrating Motivational, Social, and Contextual Work Design Features. Quantifies how autonomy-rich work design predicts performance and satisfaction, the upside of role-based work. https://asu.elsevierpure.com/en/publications/integrating-motivational-social-and-contextual-work-design-featur/
- Doblinger (2022). Individual Competencies for Self-Managing Team Performance. Establishes that self-management improves performance only if members hold the right competencies, especially self-leadership and interpersonal skills. https://doi.org/10.1177/10464964211041114
- Magpili and Pazos (2018). Self-Managing Team Performance: A Systematic Review of Multilevel Input Factors. Locates roles within a nested individual-team-organization system that must hold at all levels. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496417710500