I guess flat organization means that you build the company bottom up but unfortunately companies don't work efficiently this way. Why? My most recent experience with flat organization revealed the fact that people judged by the perception of their merit not the real value or expertise. Since everybody is biased towards certain things, based on your gender, race or background, this makes flat organizations vulnerable of people forming cliques and jinxing other people's work outside their group. Politics get even stronger in such an workplace, now you need to make these groups happy instead of just going to the right manager or exec to get something sorted. These groups can promote broken ideas, screw other other groups and have subpar performance and blame it on other groups. Without management and data collected (how long does it take to deliver a feature, how many support hours the company need to spend on a product they wrote etc.) it can get nasty very quick.
Summarizing: I don't think that flat organizations are any better than hierarchical structures, I have experience with both and I believe that flat workplaces suck more especially above a certain size (200-300+ people).
Comments
I guess flat organization means that you build the company bottom up but unfortunately companies don't work efficiently this way. Why? My most recent experience with flat organization revealed the fact that people judged by the perception of their merit not the real value or expertise. Since everybody is biased towards certain things, based on your gender, race or background, this makes flat organizations vulnerable of people forming cliques and jinxing other people's work outside their group. Politics get even stronger in such an workplace, now you need to make these groups happy instead of just going to the right manager or exec to get something sorted. These groups can promote broken ideas, screw other other groups and have subpar performance and blame it on other groups. Without management and data collected (how long does it take to deliver a feature, how many support hours the company need to spend on a product they wrote etc.) it can get nasty very quick.
Summarizing: I don't think that flat organizations are any better than hierarchical structures, I have experience with both and I believe that flat workplaces suck more especially above a certain size (200-300+ people).