Self-Managing Organizations

Michael Y. Lee; Amy C. Edmondson

Article | Research in Organizational Behavior | 2017

Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the Limits of Less-Hierarchical Organizing

Abstract

Fascination with organizations that eschew the conventional managerial hierarchy and instead radically decentralize authority has been longstanding, albeit at the margins of scholarly and practitioner attention. Recently, however, organizational experiments in radical decentralization have gained mainstream consideration, giving rise to a need for new theory and new research. This paper reviews the literature on less hierarchical organizing and identifies three categories of research: post-bureaucratic organizations, humanistic management, and organizational democracy. Despite this extensive prior work, scholarly understanding of radical decentralization remains limited. Using the term self-managing organizations to capture efforts that radically decentralize authority in a formal and systematic way throughout the organization, we set forth a research agenda to better understand less-hierarchical organizing at its limits.

Keywords: Self-Managed Organizations; Self-Managed Teams; self-organizing systems; self-managing organizations; Flat Organization; Decentralization; organization design; non-hierarchical organizations; less-hierarchical organizing; Organizational Structure; Organizational Design; Research;

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Lee, Michael Y., and Amy C. Edmondson. "Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the Limits of Less-Hierarchical Organizing." Research in Organizational Behavior 37 (2017): 35–58.

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Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the Limits of Less-Hierarchical Organizing

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