From Self-Managing Organisations (SMOs) to Self-Determining Organisations (SDOs)

This research seeks ‘a third way' between ‘naively' pretending to abolish the tension between autonomy and control or simply ‘demonising' it. Respectively, it challenges the idea that, in order to empower workers, ‘all it takes' is to remove reporting lines, as more and more examples (GitHub, Zappos, Mobil Wood, etc.) reinstate managers after experimenting in this direction; further, it tries to be more charitable than critical management studies claiming that empowering managers manipulate employees into being more engaged at work through the promise of ‘liberation', while not keeping their word in practice (e.g., Picard & Islam, 2020). To do so, the paper relies on an ‘extreme' case of employee empowerment, where the possibilities for autonomy seem to be limited at first sight: how can workers be empowered in a highly regulated sector (i.e., the insurance sector here)? Through this qualitative study, the paper defends an original account of decentralising authorities inspired from self-determination theory (SDT, Gagné & Deci, 2005), coined as self-determining organising (SDO). Essentially, this amounts to challenging Lee & Edmondson's (2017) famous ‘radical' approach known as self-managing organisations (SMOs), by advancing an inductive model backing up the experimental view of employee empowerment (e.g., Battistelli et al., 2023).