If good bosses make work great and terrible bosses make work hell, what happens if you get rid of bosses overall and move to radical decentralization? The answer depends on a number of factors which should be considered for each specific context.
There is an old and much varied saying: a great boss makes your job great, a bad boss makes your job (and your life) hell.
While this sounds plausible enough, what happens to your work environment if you completely take the boss out of the equation? How does your job compare to the status quo if there is no longer a boss who can make your (work) life great or your (work) life hell?
Looking at toxic workplaces first, it seems evident that getting rid of a horrible boss should make people’s lives immediately better. The negative effects of “asshole” bosses is well documented. While the direct impact on the efficiency and productivity of the organization are another question, the effect on people’s well-being is obvious (and in our view should be sufficient to justify firing leaders who create toxic work environments).
Does firing bosses automatically create an ideal work environment?
On the other hand, does “bosslessness” automatically lead to organizational nirvana and an ideal work environment?
To answer this question one should realize how great team leaders create positive work environments. While we make no claim that this is complete, we think there is at least a functional, a developmental, and an emotional dimension to a leader’s contribution to healthy work environments:
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On a functional level, the good leaders make division of work function for the teams and their co-workers. They plan, organize and coordinate, and enact formal hierarchy in a way that contributes to creating a positive work environment by respecting their co-workers as human beings (and not just as co-workers).
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In a developmental dimension, good bosses often bring additional competences and experiences to the team’s job, at least in some dimensions, and allow their team to profit from this advantage, by observing them and learning from them.
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Finally, on an emotional level, as Stanford professor Bob Sutton puts it, “the best leaders know what it feels like to work for them”, and they manage to create a climate of psychological safety.
The effects of radical decentralization on work environments
What happens to those outcomes and contributions to good working environments if you move towards radical decentralization and get rid of boss roles to the maximum extent possible?
In a first instance, this depends on the chosen model. But beyond that, our guess would be that within a given, larger organization, the effects of decentralization on people’s work environments will be mixed.
As a hypothesis, those who have a high level of self-efficacy can be expected to thrive in a self-management structure, as compared to those who do not have great self-efficacy.
In addition, contexts and types of workplace environments that inherently call for decentralized action and decision-making - e.g. in professional services, projects or mission-based operations - will find it easier to adapt to increased decentralization, because it does not fundamentally change the nature of the workplace environment.
But of course, there are not only great bosses and terrible bosses, there are also average bosses - and those average bosses are probably the majority in any organization. While their positive impact on the work atmosphere (beyond functional management tasks of coordinating inputs and outputs) might be improved by leadership development programs, the overall impact on employee experience, engagement and empowerment will vary. And within that variation, a good portion of employee disengagement and disempowerment will result from the structural effects of managerial hierarchy, inadequate delegation practices, and micromanagement.
We believe the bottom line is that there is no one-size-fits-all model for designing self-managing organizations. Any leader or business partner who thinks there could be positive effects from further decentralizing work should explore and decide for themselves if decentralization, and at what levels, is right in a given context.
To support such deliberations, Management Kits is creating business and organization design tools that allow you to acquire key knowledge, ask key questions, and design concepts that allow you and your team to move forward in a productive manner.