Return-to-office edicts and budget cuts have revived a blunt question: what, exactly, are managers for? Some leaders eye the layers between the front line and the CEO and wonder if those layers are the problem. Others recall Zappos’ turbulence and predict chaos the moment titles vanish. Both instincts miss the point. Self-management is neither a vibe nor a vacuum. It is a choice to relocate formal authority into teams, with exacting rules about how work is owned and decisions are made.
What self-management actually is
Michael Y. Lee and Amy C. Edmondson offer the reference definition. Self-managing organizations decentralize authority radically, formally, and systematically across the company, and their distinguishing feature is the elimination of the manager–subordinate relationship (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). The same review synthesizes decades of management research: traditional hierarchy is well suited to reliable execution of known tasks in stable environments, yet it tends to inhibit complex, cross-boundary problem solving, hardens rigidity, and amplifies status differences that stifle people’s development (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). The implication is not that hierarchy is obsolete. It is that the operating context should set the structure, not the other way around.
The public debate rarely makes that distinction. In 2016, a group of practitioners and scholars argued that the conversation around holacracy and self-management had become polarized, more cheering or jeering than learning. They noted, accurately for that moment, that Zappos was the largest firm trying holacracy in full and urged a more balanced assessment of what self-managed teams can and cannot do (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016).
Scale without bosses: the Buurtzorg case
If the idea still sounds utopian, a Dutch home-care provider shows how far it can go. By January 2021 Buurtzorg employed roughly 14,700 people organized into more than 900 self-managing teams, each capped at about 12 nurses, with no middle managers or supervisors at all. The company had only two directors and roughly 50 people in the back office. About 21 internal coaches supported some 950 teams, and those coaches had no formal authority and no responsibility for team productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025). This is not a sketch. It is an organizational architecture that has endured and expanded across a national service.
Cost and constraint matter. A widely cited benchmark put Buurtzorg’s overhead at 8 percent versus a sector average of 25 percent in Dutch home care, but that comparison dates to around 2015 and should not be read as a current figure. The same case notes that Buurtzorg’s cost per hour was higher than peers (€54.47 versus €48.74) (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The lesson is not that self-management is always cheaper. It is that you must understand where costs live and how value is created.
The authors are careful about boundary conditions. The model works best when interdependence between teams is low, frontline employees are highly motivated and competent, and services can be delivered by modular, locally autonomous units (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Those conditions do not describe every business. They do describe many service settings where most customer value is created at the edge and where delay or second-guessing from a distant manager adds little.
Well-being, not just ideology
Skeptics often argue that removing hierarchy loads stress onto employees who must navigate ambiguity and peer dynamics without a boss to escalate to. Recent survey evidence complicates that story. Researchers in Finland developed and validated separate scales for organizational self-management and individual employee self-management, then tested them in two samples: 425 workers across multiple organizations and a nationally representative panel of 2,000 Finnish employees. Both types of self-management were positively related to work engagement and negatively related to burnout, with part of the relationship explained by job demands (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). The studies are correlational, not causal, so we cannot say self-management reduces burnout. We can say that, across diverse workers, greater self-management tends to co-occur with healthier, more engaged work.
That finding sits comfortably with the design logic. If authority is pushed to where the knowledge is, and if teams have clarity about roles and accountabilities, people should experience more control and less learned helplessness. The caveat is already on the page. Clarity is not optional. Self-management replaces a manager’s gatekeeping with explicit agreements about who decides what, how conflicts are resolved, and how the rest of the system supplies shared services. Where those agreements are thin, the stress returns.
The Zappos caution
The most famous experiment in boss-less organizing is also a reminder to avoid fashion. In March 2015 Zappos offered employees a choice: fully commit to holacracy or take a buyout. Eighteen percent accepted the severance offer (Groth, 2020). Over the next few years Zappos pared back the bureaucratic rituals of holacracy and reintroduced managers. By March 2017 the company replaced holacracy with an internal market system in which teams operated like small businesses with their own P&Ls and traded services at market prices, a shift prompted by “big challenges” in business metrics and criticism that holacracy was excessively inward-focused (Groth, 2020). The signal is not that self-management failed. It is that an organization must evolve the operating model to fit its economics and culture, not a brand-name method.
Context and sequence matter here as well. In 2016, observers urged a more even-handed assessment of self-management’s promise and limits, pushing back against caricatures from both fans and critics (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016). Zappos’ pivot four years later underscores that point. A self-managing design is a means, not a creed. When the means stop serving the ends, leaders should change the design.
What to do now
For executives weighing a flatter model, three moves follow from the evidence.
- Start with where structure is the bottleneck. If your work is mostly known and stable, classic hierarchy still does a job. Where nonroutine, cross-boundary problems dominate, look harder at decentralizing authority in a formal way (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
- Choose contexts that fit the boundary conditions. Pilot with modular, customer-facing units where team interdependence is limited and frontline skill is high. Design for coaches and enabling services that support teams without formal authority over them (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
- Measure what matters for people. Track engagement and burnout with validated instruments that distinguish organizational and individual self-management, and watch how job demands mediate the picture. Treat associations as signals to investigate, not proof of causation (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025).
The through line is discipline. Self-management is structure by another name. When you remove bosses you must add agreements, capabilities, and services so that teams can take real responsibility. Do that in the right places, and you get faster decisions and stronger ownership. Do it by slogan, and you will be backfilling managers before the quarter is out.
Sources
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines SMOs and synthesizes when hierarchy helps or hinders, grounding the article’s core distinctions. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype, Harvard Business Review. Describes the polarized debate and Zappos’ status in 2016, supporting the call for 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, Journal of Organization Design. Provides case evidence on scale, structure, overhead context, cost per hour, 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, BRQ Business Research Quarterly. Shows positive associations between self-management and engagement and negative associations with burnout, with mediation by job demands, while noting correlational limits. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23409444241307734
- Groth (2020). Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy, Quartz. Documents the 2015 ultimatum, 18% buyout, rollback of holacracy, and 2017 shift to an internal market model. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy