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Fading hierarchies and the emergence of
new forms of organization
Stephan Billinger
1†
and Maciej Workiewicz
2*†
* Correspondence: workiewicz@
essec.edu
†
Stephan Billinger and Maciej
Workiewicz contributed equally to
this work.
2
Department of Management,
ESSEC Business School, 95021
Cergy-Pontoise, France
Full list of author information is
available at the end of the article
The goal of this special issue, “Fading hierarchies and the emergence of new forms of
organization”, is to address an important phenomenon—the slow but steady replace-
ment of traditional top-down hierarchies with more decentralized structures where
employees are given significant autonomy in how to carry out their work or which
projects to undertake. The popular press, business books, and several articles published
on the pages of this very journal have been describing, often in optimistic and upbeat
tones, the new breed of organizations where traditional superior-subordinate relation-
ships have been significantly modified or eschewed entirely. Here we recommend the
readers explore the excellent Organizational Zoo articles in this journal to find descrip-
tions of such organizations (e.g., Burton et al. 2017, Hsieh et al. 2018, Puranam and
Håkonsson 2015).
This special issue focuses on the ongoing trend of flattening of organizations.
Following the editorial strategy of this journal, we are interested in new forms of
organization, associated systems and processes, and outcomes stemming from unortho-
dox organizational forms. In a few selected articles the contributors to this special issue
make a number of relevant observations concerning recent developments and raise
several important points. In this editorial statement, we share some reflections regarding
the contents of these articles and offer our own interpretation of key points contained
therein, as well as elaborate on fading hierarchies which are being replaced by new forms
of organization.
When developing this special issue we were motivated by the oft-reported disappear-
ance of traditional hierarchical forms that occupied scholarly articles as well as
the minds of managers and organizational designers at least as early as Weber’s sem-
inal book (1954) on law in economy and society. Particularly, in recent years the rapid ad-
vancement of information technologies (IT) like Internet and artificial intelligence (AI) has
created opportunities to introduce novel organizational forms that were impossible to con-
ceive not too long ago. Often technological advancements are joined by emerging societal
desires and sensibilities which are pushing many organizations to get rid of some of their
bureaucracy to attract autonomy-seeking Millennials who wish to have more control over
what they do at their workplace (Lee and Edmondson 2017,Turco2016). Thus, a novel
organizational form is often synonymous with being less hierarchical and less
bureaucratic.
© The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
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indicate if changes were made.
Billinger and Workiewicz Journal of Organization Design (2019) 8:17
https://doi.org/10.1186/s41469-019-0057-6
Novel organizational forms
What makes an organizational form unorthodox or novel? Puranam, Alexy, and Reitzig
(2014) have suggested that to be truly novel, an organizational form in question should
be solving at least one of the fundamental problems of organizing (task division and
allocation, reward distribution, and information provision) in a new way when compared
to other organizations that share similar goals. Their approach is useful in that it provides
a structured way for defining new forms of organizing, and proposing an approach to
determine whether a given solution is novel enough to qualify. However, the task of
proving novelty remains challenging for many scholars or practitioners. Given that each
of the four fundamental problems can be solved in a practically infinite number of ways
(depending on how finely we are prepared to partition the possible variants of
organizational culture, leadership styles, incentives schemes, etc.), there is a huge variety
of possible combinations, with differences between individual forms sometimes being
imperceptible. Even if only some of these combinations produce viable forms, we still end
up with a rather large search space where many promising solutions (peaks) may need to
be evaluated (Levinthal 1997). At the same time, new solutions to the fundamental prob-
lems are being discovered as the Organizational Zoo examples suggest. Chandler (1962)
has documented how new technologies, like rail and telegraph gave birth to new forms,
like the modern corporation, a form that was unfeasible before. Thus, it is natural to ex-
pect that the current rapid progress in IT and AI technologies will continue to pro-
duce new possibilities.
Similarly, we should not neglect new organizational forms that are simply a contem-
porary application of pre-existing organizational solutions. One frequent critique of
novelty in organizational forms is that, most of the time, if we search well enough we
will find that a given “novel”solution has in fact been around for some time already;
sometimes even in similar settings. Indeed, when looking at the self-organizing
companies like Valve or GitHub, one may compare to the examples dating back to the
anarchist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. Kropotkin
and Bakunin, the two leading thinkers of the anarchist movement in the nineteenth
century, defined anarchy as essentially a philosophy opposed to authority. Following
this philosophy, in the 1930s workers in Catalunya, Spain, took control of the local
industries and organized themselves in collectives that practiced self-management
(Marshall 2009). Similarly, early Kibbutz movement in Palestine further borrowed some
of the ideas from the early anarchist movement. W.L Gore is another widely known
and more recent American example of this from the 1960s. Can we thus claim that
there is anything interesting or new about GitHub or Valve? Should these organizations
deserve a closer study if they simply repeat long-existing solutions?
We would like to argue that there is one type of novelty that may be more important
to organizational scholars and practitioners than those proposed above. Part of the
reason behind creating this journal was to have a platform where academic community
interested in the topics of organization design can exchange ideas. Thus, "novel" can
equally be defined as new to us, researchers who study organizations. As long as a given
organizational form or, more specifically, a particular solution to the fundamental prob-
lem of organizing has not been sufficiently described and analyzed, we can refer to it as
novel, study it, and share our findings. While risking a rather crude comparison, we
may say that just like a biologist capturing a new butterfly can proclaim a new species
Billinger and Workiewicz Journal of Organization Design (2019) 8:17 Page 2 of 6
does not imply that the butterfly did not exist before being discovered. Furthermore,
even if a given form or solution has been described in the past, there can still be some-
thing new and interesting to say about it. Discovering how the Morpho butterfly pro-
duces the beautiful blue color of its wings happened long after the species was
discovered, named, and described (Vukusic et al. 1999). We could thus propose another
approach to novelty in organizational forms and ask, “What new can we say about
novel or old forms of organizing?”.
It is important to mention here that we do not want to imply that scholars should
have a monopoly on deciding what is new and interesting about organization design.
We are simply speaking about specific interests of the academic community and
debates within this community on which organizational forms are truly new and
worthy of study. Some may accuse our position of encouraging unnecessary Columb-
ism in academic research, where a researcher finds a new form, plants a flag, and
proclaims discovery, when in fact the organizational form in question has been already
widely applied and discussed among practitioners. That is not our intention. We simply
recognize that applying a scientific method is the correct approach to studying and
understanding social phenomena (Lave and March 1975, Simon 1969). Thus, not all
that is novel to a scholar will be novel to a practitioner, but also not all that is novel to
a practitioner will be novel to a scholar.
The value of case studies
Reflecting on the articles published in this special issue, as well as those published in
this journal over the years, we wanted to highlight the value of looking up close at these
new forms of organizing. Similarly to biology, possessing identical genotypes does not
automatically mean that the phenotypes will be the same. While two organizations may
resolve the fundamental problems of organizing in the same way, the actual expression
of these genes can make all the difference between a functional and dysfunctional
organizational form. Often subtle differences in culture, the character of a founder,
managerial biases, and background can significantly impact efficacy of a given
organizational form.
Consequently, it would be hard to claim that organizations with little or no formal
hierarchy to manage their affairs are novel to the world. It would be equally difficult to
say that hierarchies fading or disappearing is a recent trend—or a trend at all. We simply
do not have enough systematic studies to conclude what proportion of organizations have
abandoned strict formal hierarchies in favor of flat, matrix, or self-organizing solutions
and whether this proportion is growing over time (see for example Guadalupe et al.
2013). We know they exist and we are aware that they remain relatively understudied
compared with traditional hierarchical forms. Thus, these forms are certainly “emerging”
as an interesting and promising area for study. Many questions remain unanswered,
however. What makes these forms perform better than traditional alternatives? What
specific bundles of organizational features produce effective non-hierarchical forms? In
what types of environments should one turn towards non-hierarchical forms? Does the
type of employees matter for the performance of such organizations? What are the possi-
bilities for embedding non-hierarchical or less-hierarchical forms in organizations? What
is the role of leadership in such firms? What are underlying processes by which new
organizational forms affect decisions and outcomes? These are the questions that will
Billinger and Workiewicz Journal of Organization Design (2019) 8:17 Page 3 of 6
need to be answered in greater detail and questions that we were inspired by when
coming up with this special issue.
Summary of the articles included in this special issue
The field study by Griffith et al. (2018) uses the literature on substitutes for leadership
(Dionne et al. 2005, Kerr and Jermier 1978, Podsakoff et al. 1996)asapointofdeparture
to develop a conceptual model that explains work engagement and the role that managers
play in facilitating it. The authors test their model using Scandinavian datasets to show
that feedback from work and technological support have the strongest relationship with
work engagement. They further find that supervisor electronic communication, mediated
by alternative workplace use also plays a role in explaining work engagement. Overall, the
findings show that complements, rather than genuine substitutes, may help managers
adopt a supervisory leadership style that considers recent developments in society. This
includes electronic communication and alternative workplace usage but also builds on
having work that provides direct feedback and does not require interpretation by a super-
visor. These findings are important for new organizational forms as they highlight that
hierarchy in new organizational forms still exists, but uses different means to monitor and
supervise people, who in turn respond by displaying higher work engagement.
The case study by Livijn (2019) examines the role of middle managers during an
organizational reorganization. Building on prior research on middle managers (Balogun
and Johnson 2004, Huy 2002, Wooldridge and Floyd 1990), Livijn uses in-depth
analysis to show how middle managers not only implement strategic rationale that
top-level executive developed and imposed on the organization, but rather actively
develop their own micro-design that was essential for macro strategy to be imple-
mented. Livijn thereby highlights a new role of middle managers, the role of designing,
which prior literature had not identified before. She finds that this role requires middle
managers to engage less in vertical communication with senior executives, but instead
increase lateral communication that seeks to develop solutions in a decentralized and
more collaborative way. Overall, the findings complement prior research which already
had highlighted the importance of middle managers, for instance, taking into consider-
ation organizational continuity and sensemaking during restructuring and strategic
reorientations. Livijn’s insights stress the importance of designing as a core role of mid-
dle management and highlight the need for new organizational forms to consider
decentralized organization micro-design to create fit in a given context.
The paper by Kolbjørnsrud (2018) investigates mechanisms underlying collaborative
organizational forms that build on unconventional hybrid governance structures. The
study uses work on the basic functioning of organizations (Adler 2001, Bradach and
Eccles 1989, Puranam et al. 2014) as a point of departure to examine how the three ar-
chetypes; hierarchy, market, and community are prevalent in new organizational forms.
Kolbjørnsrud showcases various organizational examples that adopted new forms, in
particular, new hybrid organizational forms that rely on a combination of these differ-
ent archetypes, e.g., how an adhocracy relies on community and hierarchical
organization, or how crowd contests build on market and community forms of
organization. Kolbjørnsrud also shows how these archetypes (i.e., market, community,
hierarchy) address universal problems of organizing concerning task division and allo-
cation, reward distribution, and information provision. Overall, the study provides an
Billinger and Workiewicz Journal of Organization Design (2019) 8:17 Page 4 of 6
overview of new (hybrid) organizational forms and how they function. It shows how
collaborative structures may replace traditional forms of organization and highlights
the role of technology and how it facilitates, for instance, crowd-based solutions.
Conclusion
Hierarchy, or more precisely formal authority, serves many important roles. It has
emerged early in human history as a solution to coordinate actions of a large number
of people with diverse and specialized skills and holds them accountable for getting
work done (Jaques 1990). As hierarchy will remain to be used in the foreseeable future,
the purpose of this special issue was to examine different ways in which hierarchy can
be altered or, if feasible, replaced by non-hierarchical organizational solutions. It is
often true that one learns about and appreciates a phenomenon more when considering
an alternative without it being present.
Overall, this special issue continues the tradition of the journal by presenting papers
that bring forth specific examples of organizations and invite contemplation of novel
organizational forms. Key to all these organizational forms is the specific role of formal
hierarchy which is traditionally simply depicted with arrows from upper to lower levels
in the organizational pyramid. What seems to emerge, not only from the studies within
this special issue, is a wealth of empirical accounts that showcase the notion that this
traditional depiction is too simplistic to adequately represent what is happening in con-
temporary organizations. Many members of an organization may not have one, but sev-
eral bosses (Levinthal and Workiewicz 2018), or they work in a setting in which there
may be a single boss but much of the daily work is delegated interaction with other
organizational members that does not involve the boss (Dobrajska et al. 2015). Another
example is self-adaptive workflow management (Hsieh and Lin 2016) in which algo-
rithms determine what workers do, when and how they do it —and where the role of
the boss is merely to intervene, if exception management is needed, or the approach to
workflow management has to be altered in fundamental ways. Hierarchy in all these
contexts is highly specific as it can only be understood by examining when a manager,
or more generally others in the hierarchy, get involved as well as why, when, and how.
This requires an explicit vocabulary to describe processes concerning organizational
search and decision-making and how outcomes of any kind are evaluated and used by
whom. This special issue sheds additional light on what is relevant within some new
organizational forms and it thereby continued to develop new vocabulary to describe
what is “new”. We would think that any form of fading hierarchy or new forms of
organization are likely to require such vocabulary not only to better describe the under-
pinnings of hierarchy but more broadly to explain hierarchy’s role in today’s economy
and society, and to build theory.
Authors’contributions
Authors in alphabetical order. Both authors contributed equally. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Funding
No funding to declare.
Availability of data and materials
There are no data or materials related to the article.
Competing interests
The authors declare no financial nor non-financial competing interests.
Billinger and Workiewicz Journal of Organization Design (2019) 8:17 Page 5 of 6
Author details
1
Department of Marketing and Management, Strategic Organization Design Unit, University of Southern Denmark,
5230 Odense, Denmark.
2
Department of Management, ESSEC Business School, 95021 Cergy-Pontoise, France.
Received: 1 August 2019 Accepted: 29 August 2019
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