This paper explores leadership as a dynamic phenomenon, characterized by dialogical and negotiation processes. The study focuses on a company that differentiates itself with a non-hierarchical business structure promoting collective responsibility and self-leadership. Operating as a complex network without formally appointed managers, except for the legally mandated CEO, the organization embodies principles of agility, teamwork, and continuous reinvention. Taking departure in the results of our recent case study in the present organization (Bergmo-Prvulovic et al., forthcoming), this paper aims to understand how Holacracy (Robertson, 2007) as an analytical framework addresses the balance between autonomy and control, the distribution of power and of responsibilities, expectations on engagement, and different leader roles. What can the insights and lessons from Holacracy offer for managing the paradoxes in today's complex organizational environments?
Bergmo-Prvulovic and colleagues (forthcoming) employed a social representations theory approach to reveal and address the implicit values, ideas, and practices that shape leadership development among employees in the present company. Social representations are defined as: “a system of values, ideas and practices” (Moscovici 1973, xiii), with a dual function: establishing an order which enables individuals to orientate themselves and enabling communication among members of a community. Representations are socially, culturally, and contextually shaped through individuals’ communicative actions and daily practice (Jovchelovitch 2019; Marková 2003; Moscovici 2001). The study revealed a web of social representations of leadership and leadership development that shape the company’s values, ideas, and practices, forming a contextually characterized leadership development system. Furthermore, showing that the representations were both stable and dynamic, reflecting ongoing negotiations and conflicts in understanding. The results clearly show how the shared responsibilities distributed along with both various leadership roles and self-leadership causes confusions and conflicts. In contrast, leadership research typically emphasizes a functional perspective, focusing on individual leaders and their performance improvement (Fraher and Grint, 2018), which possible overlook the social, cultural, and contextual shaping of leadership and leadership development (Alvesson and Spicer 2012; Carroll 2019; Mabey 2013; Uhl-Bien and Ospina 2012). The results of the study demonstrated that uncovering hidden values, ideas, and perspectives can support organizational learning and cultivate a deliberate and purposeful approach to leadership development.
To explore how leadership can be both understood, practiced and developed in a flat business structure, this study applies the practice concept and management philosophy of Holocracy (Robertson, 2007) on the results of our recent study (Bergmo-Prvulovic et al., forthcoming). Holacracy redistributes authority and decision-making across an organization, promoting self-organization and autonomy (Robertson, 2007). By structuring teams around specific tasks and granting individuals the freedom to make decisions within their roles, Holacracy aims to foster innovation, enhance employee engagement, and drive organizational growth. The approach offers several benefits, including increased autonomy, improved agility, clarity in roles, and enhanced collaboration. Academic researchers have begun to examine sociocratic and holacratic organisations (Salovaara et al., 2024) and theorize new organizational forms that offers alternatives to hierarchy (Puranam et al., 2014). While practically employed in organizations, holacracy have been found to be technical and quite 'managerial,' often pushing pre-given solutions rather than supporting local approaches to self-organizing (ibid.) Challenges such as role ambiguity, decentralized decision-making, potential cultural shifts, and increased workloads can arise, as noted by Bergmo-Prvulovic and colleagues (forthcoming). Contrary to popular belief, voices have been raised that Holacracy is not non-hierarchical. Instead, it features a rigid hierarchy of self-governing circles, each subordinate to a higher circle that dictates its purpose and can modify or dissolve it if it fails to meet expectations.
Thus, since a holacratic system emphasizes democratic procedures within each circle, its structure is inherently hierarchical and inward-looking, focusing on internal governance rather than customer feedback or external outcomes. This critique underscores the complexity and potential limitations of adopting Holacracy as an organizational strategy. The results of the uncovered leadership representations in the specific business environment explored here reveal tensions regarding responsibilities and commitments, as well as between leadership as an individual or a collective act. Additionally, fostering a self-leadership culture presents both difficulties and possibilities, challenging traditional divisions of labor, roles, and responsibilities. Koistinen and Vuori (2024) underscores this, exploring five organizations that experimented with more self-managing practices. When authority relations between 'leaders' and 'followers' were weakened, it created asymmetries of responsibility, pushing the authoring of organizational arrangements to include both shared and hierarchical forms of control.
Our study illustrates the changing nature of leadership and how the meaning of leadership needs to be continuously renegotiated and recaptured in practice, especially in times of growth. The circular structure is in constant movement, and when new employees enter the circle of structure, they bring their own meanings ascribed to leadership as a phenomenon, not always compatible with the meanings of leadership that Holocracy aims at.