Плоская организационная структура: принципы и применение

Organizational structure
A flat organization (also known as horizontal organization or flat hierarchy) is an organizational structure with few or no levels of middle management between staff and executives. An organizational structure refers to the nature of the distribution of the units and positions within it, and also to the nature of the relationships among those units and positions. Tall and flat organizations differ based on how many levels of management are present in the organization and how much control managers are endowed with. A manager in a flat organization possesses more responsibility than a manager in a tall organization because there is a greater number of individuals immediately below them who are dependent on direction, help, and support. Moreover, managers in a flat organization rely less on guidance from superiors because the number of superiors above the manager is limited. This structure is generally possible only in smaller organizations or individual units within larger organizations. Having reached a critical size, organizations can retain a streamlined structure but cannot keep a completely flat manager to staff relationship without affecting productivity. Certain financial responsibilities may also require a more conventional structure. A company would not have to give a raise or promotion, based on service length but on greater productivity. Also eliminating certain departments from the payroll means saving money. The flat organization model promotes employee involvement through decentralized decision making processes. By elevating the level of responsibility of baseline employees and eliminating layers of middle management, comments and feedback reach all personnel involved in decisions more quickly. Expected response to customer feedback becomes more rapid. Australian researchers Dunford, Bramble and Littler note that delayering in an organisation may also lead to down sizing: "[a]lthough delayering need not involve down sizing because it is possible to redefine the position of existing staff within the new flatter structure the two often coincide". Frank Ostroff, in The Horizontal Organisation, argues that the horizontal structure "delivers value to customers".

In technology, agile development involves teams self managing to a large extent (though agile development is commonly still practiced within a hierarchical organization, which means that certain types of decisions such as hiring, firing, and pay raises remain the prerogative of managers). In scrum, an agile framework, team members assign work to be done among themselves, either by free choice or by consensus. The scrum master role in scrum is not a management role as such, but is a role that involves helping remove obstacles to progress and ensuring that the basic scrum framework is adhered to by all parties, inside and outside the team both aspects of the role being more akin to facilitation than to top down micromanagement. Agile frameworks such as scrum have also begun being used in non technology companies and organizations.

Drawing on Jo Freeman's famous essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Klint Finley has argued that "bossless" companies like Valve might suffer from problems related to the appropriate handling of grievances, the formation of informal cliques, the "soft power" of popular employees, unprofessional and sexist attitudes, and lack of workplace diversity. Suzanne J. Baker argues that new power dynamics can emerge that undermine the equality afforded by a non hierarchical context. When an organization decides to no longer place value on a person's position, Baker suggests that new hierarchies based on personality type, skill set, and communication style can emerge. If these hierarchies don't get acknowledged, it is much more difficult to address the emergence of a new hierarchy because they remain implicit or undetected. Mark Henricks, a business journalist and a critic of flat organization, argues that "when you have too little hierarchy, decisions don't get made or are made wrongly by employees who lack experience, accountability, or motivation to do the work of the missing managers".