Return-to-office edicts are colliding with a different reality on the ground: teams are drowning in cross-functional problems and burnout, while traditional chains of command still optimize for reliable execution, not for learning across boundaries. Many executives remember Zappos’ high-profile struggle with Holacracy and fear that self-management equals chaos. The record is more nuanced. The best academic definition, credible field cases, and new well-being data all point to a clearer lesson: self-management is a structure, not a vibe, and it succeeds where hierarchy hits its limits.
What self-management actually is
Michael Lee and Amy Edmondson define self-managing organizations as those that decentralize authority radically, formally, and systematically across the enterprise, eliminating the manager-subordinate relationship as the organizing backbone (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). Their review is explicit about the trade. Managerial hierarchy is well suited to stable contexts and known tasks, where reliability matters most. It is less effective when work is nonroutine, crosses functions, and demands learning and adaptation. Those are precisely the problems crowding executive agendas today.
The authors are careful about the evidence base. Their paper synthesizes theory and cases rather than experiments, so it does not claim universal superiority of one model over another. It does offer a clean conceptual anchor. Self-management is not an absence of structure. It is a redesigned structure in which authority and coordination rights live in roles and teams, supported by formal rules, rather than in a chain of bosses (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
The well-being signal, with a caveat
A common objection is that removing bosses simply shifts stress to the frontline. New multi-sample survey work pushes back on that worry. Using validated scales that distinguish organizational self-management from individual self-management, researchers in Finland found both forms are positively associated with work engagement and negatively associated with burnout, in a field sample of 425 employees and a nationally representative sample of 2,000 (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025). Part of the link runs through job demands, which suggests that when people have voice and discretion, strains are reframed as challenges rather than depleting burdens.
This is correlational evidence, not proof of causation. It still matters for boards watching attrition and mental health. The findings counter the claim that fewer managers automatically means more burnout, and they give leaders a testable hypothesis for their own climate surveys: where teams have real authority over how work is organized, engagement rises.
Scaling without middle managers: one careful case
If self-management is real, can it scale past a handful of teams? The Dutch home-care provider Buurtzorg offers a disciplined example of how it can, and where it might not. As of January 2021, Buurtzorg operated more than 900 self-managing teams of up to 12 nurses each, with about 14,700 employees and no middle managers or supervisors. It ran with only two directors and roughly 50 people in the back office. Team support came from 21 internal coaches, each covering more than 45 teams, and those coaches had no formal authority over performance (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The economics are not one-sided. Earlier analyses around 2015 reported Buurtzorg’s overhead at about 8 percent compared with a sector average near 25 percent in Dutch home care. Yet its cost per hour was higher than peers, €54.47 versus €48.74 (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Both figures caution against simple cost heroics. Savings on bureaucracy can be offset by professional intensity at the point of care. The authors also flag boundary conditions. The model travels best where interdependence between teams is relatively low and frontline professionals are highly motivated and competent (Martela and Nandram, 2025). That is a realistic constraint, not a flaw.
One more note of care: this is a peer-reviewed case, not an experiment, and one of the authors has research ties to the organization. Even so, the operational details matter for designers elsewhere. Authority sits with small, local teams. Central functions are compact. Coaching is developmental, not supervisory. Formal power is minimal at the center, which forces clarity in roles and transparency in work.
Learning from the hype cycle
Self-management has been mis-sold as “bossless.” The backlash was predictable. A widely read assessment in 2016 argued the debate had become polarized, with advocates and critics talking past each other. It also noted that Zappos was then the largest firm attempting Holacracy in full (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, 2016). The subsequent arc at Zappos is instructive. In 2015 the CEO issued an ultimatum to fully adopt Holacracy or take a buyout, and 18 percent of employees chose to leave. By 2017 the company had replaced Holacracy with a market-based internal system in which teams ran their own P&Ls and transacted with one another. Managers returned, and the more bureaucratic rituals of Holacracy were dropped. The move was motivated by business challenges and the sense that the prior system was too inward-looking (Groth, 2020).
This is not an indictment of self-management. It is a reminder that governance mechanisms can become the work if they are too heavy. Zappos’ pivot shows that formal methods that demand extensive meeting cycles can swallow attention. The design question is not “bosses or no bosses.” It is how to place decision rights as close to the problem as possible, with the lightest apparatus that preserves clarity and accountability.
What leaders should do now
If your company is wrestling with cross-functional problems, slow decisions, and rising burnout, treat self-management as an operating model you can pilot, not a crusade. The evidence points to four practical moves:
- Start with real teams and clear roles. Self-management decentralizes authority formally. Document who decides what and how conflicts are escalated. This is a structure, not a free-for-all (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
- Measure climate and load. Track engagement and burnout with validated instruments, and examine whether increased local authority coincides with healthier scores. Treat findings as signals, not proof, but learn from them (Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen, 2025).
- Keep the center small and helpful. Provide coaching and lightweight shared services. Avoid building a shadow hierarchy that second-guesses teams. Coaches should develop, not direct, as in the Buurtzorg case (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
- Mind the boundary conditions. Do not copy a model designed for autonomous professionals into work that requires tight cross-team coupling every hour. Match the design to interdependence and capability on the ground (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The endgame is not ideology. It is fit for purpose. Managerial hierarchy remains a proven design for stable, repeatable work. Where your bottlenecks are complexity, learning, and speed across boundaries, the burden of proof has shifted. A carefully built self-managing design can carry the load.
Sources
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines SMOs, explains when hierarchy falters, and clarifies that self-management is a formal redesign of authority. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen (2025). Self-management and employee well-being: validated scales, engagement and burnout. Shows organizational and individual self-management are associated with higher engagement and lower burnout in two samples, informing the well-being case with caution about causality. 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. Details how Buurtzorg scaled self-managing teams, the lean center, boundary conditions, and cost trade-offs. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype. Frames the polarized debate and notes Zappos as the largest full adopter in 2016, supporting a balanced view of self-management experiments. https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype
- Groth (2020). Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy. Documents the 2015 ultimatum with 18 percent buyouts, the 2017 shift to a market-based model, and the reintroduction of managers, a cautionary case on heavy governance. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy