Managing without Managers: Shaping Management Control in Self-Managing Organizations. How to Overcome Challenges of Job Autonomy?

Abstract

Recently more organizations tend to choose for a different approach regarding their management control: self-management. Typical for these self-managing organizations is increased job autonomy. Job autonomy can have many advantages for an organization and its employees, but it can also create some challenges. This can have implications for management control. This Master Thesis therefore examines how management control takes place in a self-management organization and how this relates to job autonomy. The study is performed by a case study (interviews, observations and document analysis) at Viisi. The holacracy structure at Viisi plays an important role. Many difficulties of job autonomy are overcome by creating different roles with leadership authorities. In this way leadership is contextual and distributed. Everyone is leader in his own role and possesses the decision rights concerning that role. Other roles are created to stimulate coordination, to assign roles, to hire and fire employees, to set goals and to design a compensation model. Peer control exists but is not experienced as control by employees, because of the open culture at Viisi where feedback is appreciated and stimulated. Furthermore, employees at Viisi have a lot of trust in each other. This makes control less necessary and therefore partly replaces control.