Return-to-office mandates, cost pressure, and burnout have put managers in a bind. Boards want reliability and lower overhead. Employees want autonomy and a say. Into this tension comes a familiar proposal: go self-managed. The trouble is that many firms start with the label and then wonder why the reality does not match the promise.
What self-management is, and where it helps
Self-managing organizations decentralize authority in a formal and systematic way across the enterprise, and they remove the classic boss–subordinate relationship (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). That is the definition worth using because it also clarifies the trade. Conventional hierarchy excels at reliable execution of known tasks in stable settings. It struggles with complex, cross-boundary problems, tends toward rigidity, and reinforces status differences that can stifle development. Lee and Edmondson synthesize decades of management research to make this case, but they are explicit that this is theory and case-based synthesis, not experimental proof.
The well-being story often gets lost in the structural debate. New validated scales that distinguish between organizational self-management and individual self-management show both are positively correlated with work engagement and negatively correlated with burnout, in two samples including a nationally representative Finnish panel of 2,000 people (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). The relationships are partly mediated by job demands. This is correlational, not causal, but it pushes back on the claim that fewer managers automatically mean more stress.
The design that scales: Buurtzorg’s modular autonomy
For a glimpse of scale without middle managers, look at Buurtzorg. As of January 2021 it employed roughly 14,700 people organized in more than 900 self-managing teams of up to 12 nurses, with no middle managers or supervisors (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The company operated with only two directors and about 50 people in the back office, supported by 21 internal coaches for roughly 950 teams. Those coaches had no formal authority and no responsibility for team productivity. Earlier figures reported an 8 percent overhead compared with a 25 percent sector average in Dutch home care, although that overhead comparison comes from around 2015 and should not be read as current (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The hourly cost at Buurtzorg was also higher than peers (€54.47 versus €48.74), a reminder that autonomy is not a guaranteed rate advantage.
Why did this structure travel? The authors flag boundary conditions. The model works best when interdependence between teams is low, frontline professionals are both competent and motivated, and services can be standardized with clear protocols (Martela and Nandram, 2025). In other words, Buurtzorg shrank the need for cross-team coordination, then pushed authority to where the work happens. It paired this with lightweight infrastructure and coaching rather than supervisory control. That combination makes autonomy a property of the work system, not a philosophy pinned to the wall.
For leaders wrestling with hybrid schedules, attrition, and budget cuts, that lesson is concrete. Map the work. Where does value creation depend on tight, frequent handoffs across teams? Where can you draw cleaner boundaries so that teams can own end-to-end outcomes without waiting for sign-offs? Start there. Self-management spreads when the work itself reduces the need for managerial glue.
The cautionary tale: when a method becomes the mission
The debate around Holacracy and bossless offices has been polarized for a decade. The best reporting from inside that movement urged a middle ground, not a crusade (Bernstein et al., 2016). In 2016, Zappos was the largest company to implement Holacracy in full (Bernstein et al., 2016). The experience is instructive precisely because it was not simple.
In March 2015, CEO Tony Hsieh told employees to fully adopt Holacracy or take a buyout, and 18 percent of the workforce opted to leave (Groth, 2020). Over time, Zappos backed away from pure Holacracy. It removed the system’s bureaucratic meetings and brought managers back, retaining the circular hierarchy mainly as an artifact. By March 2017 the company had shifted to an internal market in which teams acted like small businesses with their own P&Ls and traded with one another at market prices, a response to what leaders described as significant business challenges and criticism that Holacracy was too inward-looking (Groth, 2020). None of this proves that Holacracy cannot work. It does show what happens when the method eclipses the operating problem. If interdependence is high and the business metrics are faltering, a rules-heavy governance model can add friction faster than it removes managerial bottlenecks.
People outcomes are a design variable, not a perk
The well-being data matter because they clarify the mechanism. In the Finnish studies, organizational self-management and individual self-management were each positively associated with engagement and negatively with burnout, with part of the link running through job demands (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). Read practically, autonomy improves energy and reduces strain when the job is designed to reduce unnecessary demands and decision thrash. That aligns with the Buurtzorg boundary conditions and with Lee and Edmondson’s view that removing status barriers and formal hierarchy can help cross-functional problem solving while avoiding rigidity, provided the work is structured to carry the span (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
The practical read
Stop piloting methods. Start redesigning interdependence. Begin with a value stream map and identify domains where teams can own outcomes without constant cross-team coordination. Clarify decision rights and interfaces in writing. Invest in a small cadre of coaches who support teams without command authority. Use lightweight shared services for payroll, compliance, and technology, and keep them accountable to the teams they serve. When you experiment, measure engagement and burnout using validated constructs so you can see whether autonomy is improving the job or just moving decisions around on the org chart (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025).
Two added cautions. First, do not sell self-management as a universal cost play. Buurtzorg’s overhead advantage was time-bound, and its hourly rate was higher than peers in the data the case reports (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Second, do not outsource judgment to a brand-name governance system. The most balanced observers warned against that a decade ago, and the Zappos arc shows why a method cannot substitute for operational clarity (Bernstein et al., 2016; Groth, 2020).
The deeper point is simple. Self-management is not the absence of management. It is management by design. When the work is modular, interfaces are explicit, and support replaces supervision, autonomy stops being a slogan and starts being an operating advantage.
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 design-first argument. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype. Reports the polarized debate and notes Zappos as the largest Holacracy adopter in 2016, supporting a balanced view of methods. 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. Details scale, structure, overhead context, and boundary conditions, illustrating when self-management travels. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Groth (2020). Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy. Documents the 2015 ultimatum, 18% buyout, and 2017 shift to market-based dynamics with managers returning, a cautionary case. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy
- Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen (2025). Self-management and employee well-being: validated scales, engagement and burnout. Finds positive associations between self-management and engagement, and negative with burnout, informing the people side. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23409444241307734