As companies flatten structures and pare back management in the same years that burnout has become a mainstream complaint, an obvious worry surfaces. If you take away the boss, do you also take away the buffer that protected people from overload? The intuition is that hierarchy absorbs stress: managers set priorities, shield teams, and decide what does not get done. Remove them and all of that lands on the individual. It is a reasonable fear. The recent evidence just does not support it.
The objection, stated fairly
The critique deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. Self-management asks people to make decisions that a manager used to make, to negotiate scope with peers rather than receive it from above, and to hold themselves accountable without anyone enforcing it. On paper that is more cognitive and emotional load, not less. The fear that a lack of hierarchical structure would raise stress and burnout is a specific, testable claim (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). The right response to a testable claim is to test it.
What the evidence shows
A 2025 study built and validated separate measurement scales for two things that usually get muddled together: self-management at the organizational level and self-management at the level of the individual employee (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). It then examined how each related to well-being across two samples, one of 425 employees from various organizations and one of 2,000 drawn to be nationally representative of Finland. The result runs against the intuition. Both organizational and employee self-management were positively related to work engagement and negatively related to burnout (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). In other words, more self-management went with more engagement and less burnout, not the reverse the critics predicted.
The study also traces a mechanism. The link between self-management and well-being was partially mediated by job demands, so self-management relates to engagement and burnout in part through its effect on the demands people face at work (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). That is a more useful finding than a simple correlation, because it points at what to manage. Self-management is not a mood. It changes the structure of the work, and it is that change in demands that carries part of the well-being effect.
One caution belongs here in plain sight. This is correlational evidence across two large samples, not a controlled experiment, so it establishes a robust association rather than proof that self-management causes lower burnout (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). The direction and consistency are notable, but the honest reading is that the burnout objection is contradicted by the data, not that causation is settled. What the study does close off is the confident claim that flat structures must be more stressful, since across more than two thousand people the association ran the opposite way.
Why it might work this way
The result is less surprising in the light of older work-design research. A large meta-analysis found that motivational work-design characteristics, the bundle that includes autonomy, explained about a third of the variance in job satisfaction and a quarter of the variance in performance across a very large body of studies (Humphrey, Nahrgang and Morgeson, 2007). Latitude over one's own work is not just a productivity lever. It tracks with how people feel about the work. Self-management, at its best, is autonomy extended from a single enriched job to the whole way an organization runs, so it would be odd if it reliably produced misery.
The qualifier is competence. Autonomy without the ability to use it well is exactly the recipe for overload the critics imagine. A systematic review of individual capabilities in self-managed teams is blunt that self-management only pays off if members are competent to navigate it, highlighting self-leadership and interpersonal skills (Doblinger, 2022). People who can prioritize, set boundaries, and coordinate with peers experience latitude as relief. People without those skills, dropped into a system that assumes them, can experience the same latitude as pressure. The burnout risk is real, but it lives in the gap between the demands of self-management and the competence to meet them, not in self-management itself.
The practical read
Stop treating burnout as an argument against flattening and start treating it as a design constraint. The evidence associates self-management with higher engagement and lower burnout, working partly through the demands it places on people (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025), which means the lever is the demands. Watch them, and adjust the work rather than reinstating a boss. Invest in the self-leadership and interpersonal competencies that let people carry autonomy without buckling (Doblinger, 2022). And remember that the well-being upside of latitude is one of the most established findings in work design (Humphrey, Nahrgang and Morgeson, 2007). The boss was never the only thing standing between your people and burnout. Whether self-management protects them or exhausts them depends on how well you design the demands and how well you prepare people to meet them.
Sources
- Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen (2025). Self-management and employee well-being. Finds both organizational and employee self-management positively related to engagement and negatively to burnout across N=425 and N=2,000, partially mediated by job demands. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23409444241307734
- Humphrey, Nahrgang and Morgeson (2007). Integrating Motivational, Social, and Contextual Work Design Features. Shows autonomy-inclusive motivational work design explains large shares of variance in satisfaction and performance. 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 only pays off with competent members, locating burnout risk in the competence gap. https://doi.org/10.1177/10464964211041114