Research of Innovational Self-governing Organizational Structures

In today’s extremely dynamic business environment which is faced by most industries, organizations have to find new approaches to be able to adapt quickly to changes in consumer behavior, advances in technology and a constantly increasing volume of data available. The urgency of transforming digitally has generated demand for adopting self-managed organizational structures that allow companies to become more flexible and to engage employees more efficiently. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of self-managed organization structures placing a specific focus on holacracy and agile squads, which are most widely discussed and implemented, and to develop a framework for introducing self-managed structures within an organization taking into account a range of aspects characterizing a company. Qualitative methods of data analysis will be employed to study the impact of the self-governing organizational structures on an organization’s efficiency. Implementation of quantitative methods is limited due to the lack of empirical data from transformed organizations. This thesis is made up of three parts. The first part describes the relevance of self-managed structures and an urgency of transformation. Then it focuses on traditional hierarchical organizational structures pointing out their major drawbacks and limitations that can be overcome by introducing self-governing structures. The second part provides a comprehensive overview and a comparative analysis of two self-managed organizational structures: holacracy and agile squads. Experiences of transformed organizations were analyzed in order to come up with a framework of introducing a self-managed structure to an organization and to define factors contributing to success during the transformation process. The third part focuses on a detailed analysis of a selected organization’s organizational structure and a suggested approach to introducing self-governing structure to it based on the previous analysis.