[2] The idea behind flat organizations is that well-trained workers will be more productive when they are more directly involved in the decision-making process rather than closely supervised by many layers of management.
Having reached a critical size, organizations can retain a streamlined structure but cannot keep a completely flat manager-to-staff relationship without affecting productivity.
By elevating the level of responsibility of baseline employees and eliminating layers of middle management, comments and feedback reach all personnel involved in decisions more quickly.
[7] This can cause conflict with people whose career path expectations include a promotion, which may not be available within the organization due to its flat structure.
However, alternative "horizontal" career paths may be available, such as developing greater expertise in a role or mastery of a craft, and/or receiving pay raises for loyalty.
Such changes may, in some cases, require the approval of executive management and/or customers (consider, for example, a digital agency producing bespoke websites for corporate clients).
This is known as open allocation, and means that employees can switch to another team at any time, no questions asked; all desks are on wheels to make this easy.
[10] Other examples of companies with self-managing teams include the following: In technology, agile development involves teams self-managing to a large extent (though agile development is commonly still practiced within a hierarchical organization, which means that certain types of decisions such as hiring, firing, and pay raises remain the prerogative of managers).
Drawing on Jo Freeman's famous essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Klint Finley has argued that "bossless" companies like Valve might suffer from problems related to the appropriate handling of grievances, the formation of informal cliques, the "soft power" of popular employees, unprofessional and sexist attitudes, and lack of workplace diversity.
[16] Suzanne J. Baker argues that new power dynamics can emerge that undermine the equality afforded by a non-hierarchical context.