Works
- What makes self-managing organizations novel? Comparing how Weberian bureaucracy, Mintzberg's adhocracy, and self-organizing solve six fundamental problems of organizing, Journal of Organization Design 8(1), article 23, 2019
- Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers, Journal of Organization Design 14(4), 227 to 237, 2025
- The ten functions of middle managers: identifying their functional substitutes in a decentralized organization without traditional middle managers, Journal of Organization Design (online first, 28 September 2026), 2026
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The theory of self-managing organizations
Ideas
The self-managing organization as a novel form. Compared with Weberian bureaucracy and adhocracy, the self-managing organization solves the basic problems of organizing through peer accountability, transparency, and bottom-up emergence, and is a genuinely novel form, most viable where interdependence between units is low. Caveat: Conceptual; Foss and Dobrajska (2015) and Foss and Klein (2022) dispute that such forms escape existing design theory.
Adhocracy against the self-managing organization. Comparing bureaucracy, adhocracy, and self-managing organizations on six problems of organizing shows the self-managing form as novel, resting on peer accountability, transparency, and bottom-up emergence. Caveat: Conceptual.