By Lotta K. Harju
Leaderless teams may remove formal hierarchies, but informal status structures can still shape who speaks, who influences decisions, and whose concerns get heard.
Spotify, along with a growing list of other companies, has poured enormous resources into self-managing teams doing away with titles, flattening the org chart, and pushing decision-making down to the people doing the work. The vision is appealing: a workplace where everyone has a genuine say and shared ownership of outcomes. Yet when you look closely at how influence actually moves through these teams, the picture is far messier than the pitch suggests.
The evidence in favour of ditching traditional management is genuinely compelling. Buurtzorg, the Dutch home-care provider that runs roughly 15,000 nurses through self-managing teams in 25 countries, consistently posts better patient outcomes, lower costs, and happier staff. Haier, the Chinese appliance manufacturer, broke its 80,000+ employees into thousands of independent micro-enterprises that run themselves. The lesson is simple. Strip away the bureaucracy, trust employees to know their jobs, and performance takes care of itself.
That logic has fuelled a wave of agile, horizontal structures across sectors, with management headcount shrinking as accountability shifts onto teams. These models promise to unlock everyone’s potential but our research points to a much more complicated reality. Dismantling the formal chain of command does not remove the informal pecking order.
How invisible hierarchies form and reinforce themselves
We followed 585 employees through their first half-year in newly created leaderless teams at a large financial services firm in the Netherlands, an organisation that had slashed its management layer from 278 roles down to 25. On paper, every team member carried identical formal authority and no one ranked above anyone else.
In reality, familiar patterns from any conventionally managed company re-emerged almost immediately. People who sensed that colleagues respected and valued them were far more inclined to pitch ideas, suggest changes, and weigh in on decisions. And the more they contributed, the more that respect grew. Status generated voice, and voice generated more status.
The speed of it was the real surprise. Within just three months, teams explicitly designed to have no hierarchy had developed clear, if unofficial, status structures. And it was almost exclusively the already-high-status employees who used their voice to further cement their standing. The flat structure hadn’t created equal participation. It had simply pushed the old social order underground, where it operated without anyone holding a title.
When challenging the status quo turns into groupthink
There was a second, more concerning pattern. High-status employees were quick to voice forward-looking, constructive ideas that tend to land well. In contrast, they were much slower to raise red flags, point out flaws, questioning decisions, or naming uncomfortable truths. It seems that speaking up in low-risk, well-received ways is how these individuals built their social capital first. Only afterward did they feel secure enough to take on the riskier work of dissent.
That sequencing creates two real problems. First, the people most likely to challenge a flawed decision are, almost by definition, the ones already holding the most influence. This means that teams risk losing out on the perspectives of people who notice issues early but stay quiet because they haven’t yet established their position in the team. Second, even when influential members do eventually raise concerns, the timing works against the team. Problems are far easier to fix when caught early, not after someone has spent months building up the social credit to voice them.
Put together, this creates fertile ground for groupthink as team members hold back criticism out of fear it will cost them. And this danger may actually run deeper in leaderless teams than in hierarchical ones, since a manager in a traditional structure can proactively ask for input or build formal channels for surfacing concerns. Leaderless teams have no such built-in safeguard.
Why this should matter to leaders
The shift toward autonomous, self-directed teams shows no sign of slowing down, propelled by digital transformation, pressure for quicker decisions, and a post-pandemic rethink of how work gets done. Companies moving toward flatter, more agile structures are counting on the widely cited upsides of employee empowerment. What our findings suggest is that this bet comes with a hidden cost that most organisations haven’t planned for.
To be clear, none of this means leaderless models don’t work. The danger is that, absent deliberate attention to how influence actually gets distributed, these structures can end up recreating the very participation gaps they were meant to eliminate.
We see three practical takeaways for leaders navigating this shift.
First, the opening months matter disproportionately. The feedback loop connecting status to constructive voice was at its strongest during the first three months of a team’s existence, after which the patterns hardened and became much harder to change. Teams that are simply set loose to find their own rhythm are, in practice, letting an informal hierarchy calcify. Facilitators, coaches, and the teams themselves need to treat this early window as a deliberate design opportunity, not something to leave to chance.
Second, psychological safety alone won’t fix this. The real driver isn’t just whether people feel safe speaking up but whether they feel genuinely respected and valued by their peers. Building that requires deliberate, sustained investment in a culture of inclusion, not just an open-door policy.
Third, teams need explicit mechanisms for surfacing dissent, not just agreement. Rotating the role of a critical evaluator through team meetings, and actively rewarding people for raising uncomfortable questions, can help offset the social incentives that currently favour only ideas everyone already agrees with.
The paradox at the heart of leaderless teams
In leaderless teams, influence tends to flow toward those who feel already well-regarded. These models are sold on the promise that everyone gets to lead but the social dynamics they trigger guarantee that some people end up leading far more than others.
Dismantling formal hierarchy is not the same thing as equalising influence. It’s only the starting point of a much longer process that demands ongoing, intentional design. Leaders who grasp this will be positioned to unlock the real advantages these models offer. Those who miss it risk discovering they’ve simply traded one hierarchy for an invisible one.
