Why It Is Time to Get Rid of Hierarchical Structures and Focus More on Humans
A customer-support employee notices the same problem appearing repeatedly.
Customers are confused by a policy, and the employee can see a relatively simple way to improve it. Yet changing the process requires approval from a supervisor, a department manager, a director, and a committee that meets once a month.
By the time a decision is made, more customers have experienced the same frustration.
The organization employed someone close enough to recognize the problem but placed that person too far from the authority needed to address it.
This is one of the central failures of rigid hierarchy: knowledge and legitimate action become separated by layers of permission.
Despite the title, the answer is not to abolish every manager, reporting line, or level of authority. Large organizations still need accountability, coordination, specialist oversight, and clear responsibility for consequential decisions.
The goal is more practical:
Replace rigid hierarchies that concentrate information and routine decision-making at the top with human-centered structures that move appropriate authority closer to the work.
Organizations still need structure. They need structure designed around human knowledge, judgment, dignity, and capability.
Hierarchy Solves Real Problems—Until It Becomes the Default
Hierarchy exists because it can help organizations coordinate large numbers of people.
It can make final responsibility visible, establish escalation routes, standardize repeated work, allocate limited resources, and resolve disagreements when consensus is impossible. Hospitals, public agencies, financial institutions, and safety-critical companies cannot operate responsibly without defined areas of authority.
Research on the functions and dysfunctions of hierarchy reflects this tension. Hierarchy can provide order and coordination, but steeper or more rigid structures do not automatically produce stronger performance.
Problems begin when hierarchy stops being a tool for managing genuine complexity and becomes the default response to every decision.
One mistake leads to an additional approval. Another management layer is introduced to oversee the first. Routine questions move upward because independent judgment feels unsafe. Employees learn that waiting for permission is less risky than taking responsibility.
Over time, the organization may become highly controlled but poorly responsive.
A useful distinction is:
- Structure organizes responsibilities, information, and decisions.
- Hierarchy arranges authority at different levels.
- Rigid hierarchy routinely treats rank as more important than relevant knowledge.
Human-centered organizations do not eliminate structure. They stop treating control from above as the only legitimate form of structure.
The standards ISO 27500 and ISO 27501 offer guidance for developing human-centered organizations and translating those principles into management practices. They are frameworks rather than proof that one organizational model will always outperform another, but they make an important point: human-centeredness belongs in organizational policy and design, not only in employee-wellness campaigns.
How Rigid Hierarchy Distorts Voice and Decision-Making
Employees closest to customers, equipment, workflows, and daily operations often notice problems first.
They see where instructions fail, which workarounds people use, what customers repeatedly misunderstand, and where a policy produces unintended consequences.
Yet recognizing a problem does not mean feeling able to report it.
The research review behind the hierarchy of voice framework explains how the relative power and status of employees and managers can shape whether concerns are raised, how they are expressed, and how recipients interpret them.
A lower-status employee may worry about appearing difficult, disloyal, or insufficiently capable. A higher-status manager may interpret a challenge as resistance rather than useful information.
As a result, senior leaders may receive problems only after they become expensive. Recommendations may be softened as they travel upward. Reports may be shaped around what employees believe leaders want to hear.
The organization then makes decisions using an incomplete picture of itself.
Telling employees to “speak up” does not solve the problem when the surrounding structure still makes speaking costly.
If employees need unusual courage to report an ordinary operational problem, the organization has designed voice badly.
Hierarchy can also separate authority from expertise.
A senior executive may understand organization-wide strategy and risk better than a frontline employee. The frontline employee may understand a particular customer failure or operational constraint far better than the executive.
Both perspectives matter. Trouble begins when rank automatically overrides the knowledge most relevant to the decision.
This can appear when a technical choice waits for approval from a general manager, a routine customer remedy moves through several management levels, or a process improvement is rejected by someone who never uses the process.
A human-centered organization asks a different question:
Who has the information, competence, and responsibility needed to make this decision well?
The answer will not always be the most senior person in the room.
Leadership Remains, but Influence Moves Toward Knowledge
Human-centered organizations are not leaderless.
Leadership remains necessary for setting direction, allocating resources, maintaining standards, resolving difficult conflicts, and accepting responsibility for the system as a whole.
What changes is the leader’s role.
In a control-centered organization, the manager becomes a source of permission. Employees bring routine decisions upward, and the manager approves, rejects, or modifies them.
In a human-centered organization, managers focus more on creating conditions in which other people can make sound decisions.
They clarify priorities, establish boundaries, provide relevant information, develop capability, coordinate dependencies, and intervene when risks or conflicts exceed local authority.
Formal accountability can remain stable while influence moves toward the person with the most relevant knowledge.
An engineer may lead a technical decision. A frontline employee may explain operational reality. A customer researcher may interpret user evidence. A legal specialist may determine the regulatory constraints. A project leader may integrate those perspectives and remain accountable for the overall result.
Influence does not need to be distributed equally. It should be distributed intelligently.
A senior leader can make the final decision while openly recognizing that another person understands a central part of it better. That does not weaken leadership. It reduces the risk of authority becoming detached from reality.
Managers should be valued for increasing the team’s capability, not for making themselves indispensable to every decision.
Four Principles of Human-Centered Structure
Moving beyond rigid hierarchy requires more than removing management layers. Authority, information, support, and accountability must be redesigned together.
1. Replace approval chains with decision boundaries
Organizations often respond to risk by adding approvals.
Each approval may appear reasonable by itself. Together, they delay decisions, weaken ownership, and train employees to avoid judgment.
Decision boundaries provide a better alternative.
They define which choices people can make independently, which financial or risk thresholds require review, when specialist consultation is mandatory, and which legal, ethical, or safety standards are non-negotiable.
Consider a customer-service employee.
Requiring management approval for every refund may reduce one form of risk, but it also delays ordinary resolutions and signals that the employee’s judgment is not trusted.
A clearer system might authorize employees to resolve common problems up to a stated amount while requiring escalation for suspected fraud, safety issues, legal threats, or repeated product failures.
The organization retains control over consequential risk without forcing every decision upward.
Clear boundaries strengthen accountability as well as autonomy. When employees know what they own, they cannot easily claim that they were waiting for someone else to decide.
2. Support autonomy with capability and information
Autonomy does not mean the absence of leadership.
It means having meaningful discretion within a defined area of responsibility.
A broad review of self-determination theory and the future of work describes autonomy, competence, and relatedness as important psychological needs that influence motivation and functioning at work.
These needs belong together.
Employees cannot use autonomy effectively without understanding the work, having access to relevant information, and knowing where to seek support. Giving people responsibility without training, resources, or realistic workloads is not empowerment.
It is abandonment disguised as freedom.
Research on autonomy in self-managing organizations also shows why decentralization should not be romanticized. Greater autonomy can create useful resources and opportunities, but it can also introduce uncertainty and additional demands. People differ in how much autonomy they want and how prepared they feel to use it.
Human-centered work therefore combines:
- Meaningful discretion
- Clear expectations
- Relevant information
- Training and feedback
- Access to expertise
- Adequate time and resources
- Accountability for consequences
Freedom becomes useful when people have the capability and support to exercise it responsibly.
3. Design voice and participation into the system
Employees should not have to raise every concern through the person who controls their schedule, evaluation, promotion, and access to opportunities.
A single reporting route creates a serious weakness. When the direct manager is dismissive, involved in the problem, or unable to act, useful information may stop there.
Organizations can create several routes for voice, including team retrospectives, skip-level conversations, cross-functional reviews, confidential reporting channels, worker representatives, and safety or ethics committees.
Different concerns require different routes. An anonymous channel may be appropriate for a sensitive complaint but unhelpful for developing a routine improvement idea. Open discussion may encourage collaboration but feel unsafe when the power difference is large.
Psychological safety matters because people need to believe they can ask questions, admit mistakes, and raise concerns without unnecessary humiliation or retaliation. The American Psychological Association’s 2024 workplace survey found that employees reporting greater psychological safety also reported more positive workplace experiences. These are associations rather than proof that psychological safety alone caused every outcome, but they reinforce the importance of how organizations respond when people speak.
Participation should also begin before major choices have already been made.
Asking employees how they feel about a new system after its design is complete is not the same as involving them in mapping the workflow, identifying risks, testing the system, and evaluating its effects.
The International Labour Organization’s human-centered agenda for the future of work provides a broad policy framework that places people and the work they perform at the center of economic and organizational practice.
That framework does not prove that every company should adopt the same structure. It supports a more general principle: people affected by decisions should have meaningful opportunities to contribute knowledge that can improve them.
4. Measure job quality alongside output
Organizations naturally track revenue, cost, deadlines, productivity, and compliance.
Those measures matter. An organization that ignores results will not remain capable of supporting its employees or customers.
But output alone does not show the condition of the system producing it.
A team may meet its targets through unsustainable overtime. A department may reduce costs while transferring errors and frustration to another group. Employees may appear productive while lacking the ability to question a failing process.
A human-centered organization also examines whether workloads are sustainable, work is safe, skills are being used, concerns can be raised, and employees have reasonable control over how they perform their roles.
The OECD treats job quality as a multidimensional issue involving pay, security, working conditions, health, and the effective use of people’s capabilities. Its research describes associations between the quality of the working environment, worker health, and productivity.
Human well-being and organizational performance are not automatically opposed, although leaders still face real trade-offs involving cost, risk, speed, and workload.
The stronger principle is:
Sustainable performance depends partly on designing work that people can carry out safely, intelligently, and with a reasonable opportunity to use their abilities.
What Goes Wrong When Hierarchy Is Removed Badly?
Flattening an organization can create new problems when leaders remove titles without redesigning how decisions are made.
Shadow hierarchies emerge
Power does not disappear when formal levels are removed.
It may shift toward the most charismatic, well-connected, forceful, or experienced employees. Because this influence is informal, it can be harder to question than an official role with defined responsibilities.
Accountability becomes unclear
A decision may supposedly belong to everyone and therefore belong to no one.
When results are poor, team members may discover that they held different assumptions about who had final responsibility.
Consultation becomes exhausting
Participation can improve decisions, but not everyone needs to contribute to everything.
Without clear ownership, teams may hold repeated discussions in search of consensus that is unnecessary or impossible.
Autonomy becomes overload
Employees may receive more decisions without receiving more time, information, training, or support.
The organization celebrates empowerment while transferring management and coordination work onto already busy employees.
Management work becomes invisible
Prioritization, coaching, conflict resolution, resource allocation, and cross-team coordination remain necessary even when no one carries the title of manager.
Removing the title does not remove the work.
Local freedom creates inconsistency
Greater discretion can support adaptation, but it can also produce unequal treatment, duplicated effort, incompatible processes, and confusion about organizational standards.
Flattening an organization without redesigning authority, information, support, and accountability does not create human-centered work. It creates ambiguity.
Five Steps for Redesigning Hierarchy Responsibly
Organizations do not need to abolish the organizational chart overnight. They can begin with the places where hierarchy creates the greatest distance between knowledge and action.
1. Map where decisions are really made
Compare the official chart with actual practice.
Identify which choices require unnecessary approval, where informal veto power exists, and which managers have become routine bottlenecks.
The real decision network may look very different from the published hierarchy.
2. Preserve authority where genuine risk requires it
Keep clear control where legal responsibility, safety, ethics, major investment, or organization-wide consequences demand it.
The goal is not decentralization for its own sake. It is moving each decision to the lowest appropriate level.
3. Move routine decisions closer to the work
Give employees and teams authority over decisions they understand and can reasonably own.
Define the expected result, boundaries, information requirements, and conditions for escalation.
4. Redesign management around capability
Managers should spend less time approving routine choices and more time setting direction, developing people, allocating resources, coordinating dependencies, and improving the system.
Their success should be visible in how effectively the team operates without requiring their involvement in every detail.
5. Pilot, measure, and adjust
Test the redesigned authority in one team, process, or category of decisions.
Examine speed, decision quality, errors, workload, customer effects, employee experience, and unintended confusion. Expand the model only after learning how it operates in practice.
A human-centered organization should apply the same principle to itself that it expects from employees: learn from evidence rather than defend the original plan.
Put Human Capability at the Center
The customer-support employee in the opening example did not need the company to become leaderless.
They needed a structure that recognized their knowledge, defined what they could change, and provided a reasonable path for escalating what they could not.
The organization failed because knowledge and legitimate action had been separated by too many levels of permission.
Hierarchies become harmful when position matters more than information, obedience matters more than judgment, and control matters more than human capability.
The answer is not to eliminate every boundary or pretend that complex organizations need no formal authority.
It is to build structures in which responsibility remains clear, relevant knowledge can influence decisions, and people have enough skill, information, trust, and autonomy to act.
The future of work is not structure without people or people without structure.
It is structure designed around human capability.
