MICHAEL AUSTIN/THEISPOT.COM FALL 2019 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 15
[INTERVIEW]Why Teams Still Need Leaders
When people collaborate remotely, hierarchy keeps them moving in the same
direction — but leaders can flex to promote autonomy and creativity.
LINDRED (LINDY) GREER, INTERVIEWED BY FRIEDA KLOTZI
n recent years, agile and flat working structures have gained favor at many companies
and struck a responsive chord with employees who are put off by stifling hierarchies.
But doing away with hierarchy can cause confusion, spark complaints from employees,
and hasten departures, says Lindred (Lindy) Greer, associate professor of management
and organizations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and faculty
director at its Sanger Leadership Center. While agreeing that rigid forms of hierarchy
can impede innovation, she has found that it can provide many important benefits
when managed well.
Greer first became inter-
ested in team structures more
than a decade ago while inves-
tigating diversity, hoping to
understand how gender and
race play out in social interac-
tions. She found that team
members tended to be less
focused on their colleagues’
gender and ethnicity than on
the power they wielded. She
then decided to explore how
hierarchies work in organiza-
tions and what happens when
they go wrong. She has written
a number of groundbreaking
articles on hierarchy, status,
and the social dynamics of teams, including, most recently, “Why and When Hierarchy
Impacts Team Effectiveness” in the Journal of Applied Psychology.^1
MIT Sloan Management Review correspondent Frieda Klotz spoke to Greer as she was
about to travel to Seattle to coteach a course on leadership development with an orchestra
conductor at a business incubator. What follows is an edited version of their conversation.MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW: A few
years ago, many management experts and
business leaders were saying that hierarchy
had had its day and that the future belonged
to flat organizations. What’s happening? Is
the pendulum swinging back?
GREER: Hierarchy is probably the most
common form of organizing the workplace.
There aren’t a lot of good alternatives to it,
and companies need some say in manag-
ing workers, particularly as they scale.
However, there are also a lot of downsides
to hierarchy, and over the last decade my
collaborators and I have documented the
many ways in which it can go wrong. Team
members squabble over resources, engagein power struggles, and battle over rank.
All of this harms performance. One of
the burning questions in management
research right now is, what are the best
alternatives to hierarchy? But it’s a com-
plex picture — hierarchy isn’t always bad
or harmful, and its effectiveness may de-
pend on where and how it’s implemented,
and how the person at the top manages
the hierarchy. For example, there is grow-
ing interest in remote work and virtual
teams, and in that context hierarchy works
quite well.Why is hierarchy a good way to structure
virtual teams?
GREER: Hierarchy makes it easier to coor-
dinate how people work together. So for
teams that most need structure — those
operating under uncertain conditions or
when the task is unclear, as often happens
in virtual or remote teams — hierarchy is
highly effective. It still has downsides, but
the need for it is so great that it trumps
whatever internal politics and bureau-
cracy come with it. You simply need that
structure to keep people moving together.Often when people work remotely, there is
an assumption that they have more auton-
omy and freedom than office workers. But is
it wrong to think so?
GREER: Hierarchy does not have to mean
less autonomy. For example, when I talk
to the CEOs of companies doing really
well with a remote-work model — I’m
thinking about Automattic, which owns
WordPress, or 10up, a successful web-design
company — they emphasize the need for