A nonhierarchical workplace may just be a more creative and happier one. But how would you feel if the whole office voted on whether to hire you—and when to give you a raise?
It’s a relatively safe assumption that most of us have, at one point in our lives, worked for a boss. There is comfort in the arrangement: Someone tells us what to do, and we do it. If we do it well—and “it” here could be anything from writing software to assembling a car—we may get a more spacious cube or more money, and if we do it poorly, we can expect to be let go. Above us, in an ever-narrowing spire, are the shift supervisors and floor managers and vice-presidents, each of whom is subject to his or her own unique hierarchical pressures, and above them is the CEO or president or otherwise-titled grand Pooh-Bah who dictates the rules that the rest of us must follow.
According to Nikil Saval, the author of Cubed, a forthcoming history of the modern office, the top-down management structure first proliferated in the U.S. in the rail era, as corporate barons struggled to maintain control of their sprawling new concerns. The easiest way to govern hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad, they discovered, was to erect a chain of command, which extended from the central office in New York or Chicago to the field offices on the frontier.
It was a strategy that also proved remarkably effective for the heads of large banks and telephone companies and eventually—I’m skipping a few decades here—PC manufacturers and soda-pop-makers and multinational data-processing firms. There may even be some evidence that the tiered framework is hardwired into our brains. “Hierarchy is prominent across all species and all cultures in the world,” Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School, told me recently. “It reduces conflict, helps with role differentiation, and vastly increases coordination.” In other words, employees may need managers because managers define, either implicitly or explicitly, who people are as workers. (...)
The theory that too many bosses may be an obstacle and not a boon did not achieve widespread prominence until the early eighties. The reasons are multifarious, but business historians believe it had something to do with the economic recession, which gutted the ranks of the middle managers and in the process helped companies realize that all those bosses had actually been slowing things down. There was also an increasing sense that creativity—an invaluable commodity at the tech firms and software companies of the new “knowledge economy”—might be muffled by hierarchy. A tiered framework had worked fine for railway bosses, but it could have a frankly inhibiting effect on a team whose sole task was to build something new, often out of thin air. For that, you needed space, you needed support, and above all, you needed freedom. (...)
In 1980, less than 20 percent of the companies on the Fortune 1000 list boasted at least some sort of team management structure. By 1990, it was 50 percent. By 2000, it was 80 percent. “Companies were trying to figure out the best way to foster creativity, to effect rapid change, to deal with growing global competitiveness,” says Stephen Courtright, an assistant professor at Texas A&M, who specializes in the study of self-governing workplaces. “In many cases, that involved flat, horizontal management.”
But only in recent years have we really seen the ideal of the democratized workplace brought to its logical conclusion: companies that don’t just have fewer managers and bosses but have hardly any bosses at all.
by Matthew Shaer, New York Magazine | Read more:
Illustration by Marc Boutavant
It’s a relatively safe assumption that most of us have, at one point in our lives, worked for a boss. There is comfort in the arrangement: Someone tells us what to do, and we do it. If we do it well—and “it” here could be anything from writing software to assembling a car—we may get a more spacious cube or more money, and if we do it poorly, we can expect to be let go. Above us, in an ever-narrowing spire, are the shift supervisors and floor managers and vice-presidents, each of whom is subject to his or her own unique hierarchical pressures, and above them is the CEO or president or otherwise-titled grand Pooh-Bah who dictates the rules that the rest of us must follow.
According to Nikil Saval, the author of Cubed, a forthcoming history of the modern office, the top-down management structure first proliferated in the U.S. in the rail era, as corporate barons struggled to maintain control of their sprawling new concerns. The easiest way to govern hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad, they discovered, was to erect a chain of command, which extended from the central office in New York or Chicago to the field offices on the frontier.It was a strategy that also proved remarkably effective for the heads of large banks and telephone companies and eventually—I’m skipping a few decades here—PC manufacturers and soda-pop-makers and multinational data-processing firms. There may even be some evidence that the tiered framework is hardwired into our brains. “Hierarchy is prominent across all species and all cultures in the world,” Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School, told me recently. “It reduces conflict, helps with role differentiation, and vastly increases coordination.” In other words, employees may need managers because managers define, either implicitly or explicitly, who people are as workers. (...)
The theory that too many bosses may be an obstacle and not a boon did not achieve widespread prominence until the early eighties. The reasons are multifarious, but business historians believe it had something to do with the economic recession, which gutted the ranks of the middle managers and in the process helped companies realize that all those bosses had actually been slowing things down. There was also an increasing sense that creativity—an invaluable commodity at the tech firms and software companies of the new “knowledge economy”—might be muffled by hierarchy. A tiered framework had worked fine for railway bosses, but it could have a frankly inhibiting effect on a team whose sole task was to build something new, often out of thin air. For that, you needed space, you needed support, and above all, you needed freedom. (...)
In 1980, less than 20 percent of the companies on the Fortune 1000 list boasted at least some sort of team management structure. By 1990, it was 50 percent. By 2000, it was 80 percent. “Companies were trying to figure out the best way to foster creativity, to effect rapid change, to deal with growing global competitiveness,” says Stephen Courtright, an assistant professor at Texas A&M, who specializes in the study of self-governing workplaces. “In many cases, that involved flat, horizontal management.”
But only in recent years have we really seen the ideal of the democratized workplace brought to its logical conclusion: companies that don’t just have fewer managers and bosses but have hardly any bosses at all.
by Matthew Shaer, New York Magazine | Read more:
Illustration by Marc Boutavant
