Executives keep returning to the same uncomfortable question: how much authority should live at the edge of the organization rather than at the top. The arguments usually harden into caricature. Either bossless utopias or a reversion to command and control. A more useful read sits in the middle. The record shows self-management can work, often well, but only when leaders treat it as a system with constraints, not a slogan. As Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee observed during the initial holacracy wave, the discourse around self-management tends to polarize, which obscures what is actually promising about it and what is not (Bernstein et al., 2016).
What self-management actually is
Michael Y. Lee and Amy C. Edmondson offer the clearest benchmark. Self-managing organizations decentralize authority radically, formally, and systematically across the whole enterprise, and their defining feature is the elimination of the manager–subordinate relationship as the basic unit of control (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). Their synthesis also reminds us why the idea keeps resurfacing. Conventional managerial hierarchy excels at reliable execution of known tasks in stable environments. It struggles with complex, cross-boundary problem solving, tends toward rigidity, and reinforces status differences that can stunt development (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). Self-management is not the absence of structure. It is a different structure that moves decisions closer to the work and trades positional authority for role-based, contextual leadership.
What the people data say
A common critique is that removing layers of managerial oversight simply shifts stress to employees. Recent measurement work pushes against that assumption. Across two samples, one of 425 employees from multiple organizations and another of 2,000 in a nationally representative Finnish panel, Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen developed validated scales to measure both organizational self-management and employee self-management, and found that both correlated positively with work engagement and negatively with burnout (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). The relationships were partially mediated by job demands, suggesting that self-management relates indirectly to energy at work through how tasks are structured (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). These are correlations rather than causal estimates, so they do not prove that self-management reduces burnout. They do give leaders a credible way to track whether their redesigns are improving or eroding day-to-day experience.
Scaling without middle managers, and what it costs
If self-management is more than a boutique ideal, it should scale. The Dutch home-care organization Buurtzorg shows that it can, within limits. As of January 2021, Buurtzorg operated more than 900 self-managing teams, with a maximum of 12 nurses per team, and had roughly 14,700 employees. It reported two directors, about 50 people in the back office, and no middle managers or supervisors (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The scaffolding is deliberately light. Around 21 internal coaches support about 950 teams, roughly one coach per 45 or more teams, and those coaches have no formal authority and no responsibility for team productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The economics are nuanced. Reports cited in that case indicated Buurtzorg’s overhead was about 8 percent versus a sector average of 25 percent in Dutch home care, figures associated with around 2015, but its hourly cost was higher at €54.47 compared with €48.74 (Martela and Nandram, 2025). In other words, the model can lower administrative burden but does not guarantee a lower price per hour. Context matters too. The authors flag boundary conditions under which the model performs better, including low interdependence between teams and frontline staff who are both highly motivated and competent (Martela and Nandram, 2025). That combination lets small autonomous units own end-to-end work without constant coordination overhead.
The hype tax and the redesign that endures
Zappos is often cited in these debates for good reason. In 2016 it was the largest company to implement holacracy in full, a fact that made it the lightning rod for both celebrants and skeptics (Bernstein et al., 2016). The full story is more cautionary than the slogans admit. In March 2015, CEO Tony Hsieh gave employees an ultimatum to fully commit to holacracy or leave, and 18 percent took a buyout. By March 2017 the company had replaced holacracy with an internal market system in which teams ran their own profit-and-loss accounts and transacted with one another at set prices. Over time Zappos stripped away the most bureaucratic holacracy meetings and brought managers back, keeping only the circular hierarchy as a leftover artifact. By 2020, the company had quietly backed away from pure holacracy (Groth, 2020).
The lesson is not that self-management fails. It is that copying a branded operating system is a poor substitute for designing one that fits your work. Bernstein and colleagues warned against the hopeful-versus-hopeless framing a decade ago, and the subsequent Zappos arc bears that out. Treat self-management as a set of choices about who decides what, how roles and accountabilities are defined, and how coordination actually happens, then stress-test those choices against the realities of your interdependence, talent mix, and economics (Bernstein et al., 2016; Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The practical read
Start with definitions, not slogans. If you cannot describe which decisions will move to the edge and what formal mechanisms replace the manager–subordinate tie, you are not doing self-management. You are removing managers and hoping for the best. Lee and Edmondson provide the definitional bar to clear (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
Instrument for well-being early and often. Use validated scales for organizational and employee self-management alongside engagement and burnout measures to watch whether autonomy is fueling energy or producing overload. The Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen measures are a practical starting point, with the caveat that they capture associations rather than causation (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025).
Design for your interdependence. Where work can be contained in small units with minimal cross-team coupling and where frontline professionals are strong, the Buurtzorg experience suggests you can scale with very thin management layers. Where interdependence is high, expect to invest more in coordination or keep more conventional structure. And keep your eyes on the economics. Lower overhead from fewer managers can coexist with higher unit costs, which may still be a good trade if outcomes or retention improve, but only if you know what you are optimizing for (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The future is not bossless. It is better bossing by system. The organizations that will gain from self-management are the ones that replace hierarchy with explicit, fit-for-purpose mechanisms rather than ideology, and that measure the human effects with the same seriousness they bring to financials.
Sources
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines SMOs as the formal, radical elimination of manager–subordinate ties and explains where hierarchy helps and where it hinders. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype. Documents the polarized debate around self-management and notes Zappos as the largest full holacracy adopter at the time, urging a balanced assessment. https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype
- Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen (2025). Self-management and employee well-being: validated scales, engagement and burnout. Validates measures and finds both organizational and employee self-management correlate with higher engagement and lower burnout, with partial mediation by job demands. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23409444241307734
- Martela and Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Describes Buurtzorg’s scale, lean coaching, conditions for success, and reports on overhead and hourly cost figures from the period referenced. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Groth (2020). Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy. Reports the 2015 ultimatum with 18 percent buyouts, the 2017 shift to an internal market, and the reintroduction of managers, marking the retreat from pure holacracy. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy