When I attended my first Holacracy workshop in early 2014, something shifted. Within a few months, our team had adopted the Holacracy Constitution, and role-based governance has shaped how we work ever since.
Twelve years later, one conviction has only grown stronger: role-based organisations are not about removing structure. They are about creating structures that are clearer, more transparent, and able to evolve alongside the organisation. When roles, accountabilities, and decision-making are explicit, people spend less time navigating ambiguity and more time creating value.
I also want to be candid. This path is not for every organisation, nor is it always straightforward. There is no universal operating model. Whether you choose Holacracy, Sociocracy, another role-based framework, or your own approach matters less than making that choice deliberately, understanding the principles behind it, and committing to the discipline required to make it work.
This whitepaper is an invitation to explore a different way of organising, one where clarity replaces confusion, roles replace assumptions, and structure enables autonomy rather than constraining it. Whether you are taking your first steps or refining an existing model, I hope these pages will offer both practical guidance and fresh inspiration.
We built Talkspirit around that same belief. Every organisation deserves the freedom and the tools to design how it works intentionally, instead of inheriting structures that no longer serve its purpose. Because the way an organisation is designed ultimately shapes what it is able to achieve.
The way we organise work is undergoing a fundamental transformation.
Across industries and continents, forward-thinking leaders are recognising that organisational models designed for a slower, more predictable world are no longer sufficient to navigate today’s complexity, engage an increasingly autonomous workforce, or sustain long-term innovation.Role-based organisations offer a compelling alternative. By distributing authority through clearly defined roles rather than concentrating it in hierarchical positions, they enable organisations to become more adaptive, accelerate decision-making, strengthen accountability, and create the conditions for greater autonomy and engagement. Peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of Organization Design shows that, when implemented with the right conditions, these models can deliver significant improvements in organisational performance, stakeholder satisfaction, operational efficiency, and employee well-being.This whitepaper showcases eight landmark studies published in the Journal of Organization Design between 2018 and 2025, complemented by perspectives from leading European practitioners in organisational design. Together, they provide an evidence-based guide for executives, transformation leaders, and HR professionals exploring role-based governance.
Cristina Riesen — Chief Catalyst Officer, Talkspirit
Understand how role-based structures drive measurable business outcomes and the conditions required for success.
Discover peer-reviewed evidence that distributed governance transforms employee engagement, autonomy, and well-being.
Access a practical roadmap grounded in eight years of organisation design science, backed by real-life case studies and expert counsel.
The defining difference between traditional hierarchies and role-based organisations is not whether they can address challenges, but how they do it.
A role-based organisation structures work around clearly defined roles rather than traditional job titles. Individuals may hold multiple roles simultaneously, each carrying specific accountabilities, decision-making authority, and expected outputs. This stands in contrast to conventional hierarchical structures where authority flows top-down through managerial layers.
In his foundational 2019 study, Frank Martela identified six fundamental problems that every organisation must solve and demonstrated that self-managing organisations are characterised by three defining features: radical decentralisation of authority, minimal or absent middle management, and role-based rather than position-based structuring. These organisations address each of the six problems in fundamentally different, and often superior, ways.
Martela, F. (2019). What makes self-managing organizations novel? Comparing how Weberian bureaucracy, Mintzberg's adhocracy, and self-organizing solve six fundamental problems of organizing. Journal of Organization Design, 8, 23. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41469-019-0062-9
Role-based organisations may adopt an established framework
or design their own.
Some organisations follow Holacracy, Sociocracy, or a paradigm like Teal Organisations. Others draw on these principles to build a bespoke approach suited to their context. What matters is not the label, but the deliberate choice of how work, roles, and decisions are structured.
Real-life example: Zappos
Developed by Brian Robertson, Holacracy organises work into explicit roles grouped into self-organising circles. Each circle has full authority within its domain and operates under a shared constitution that allows the organisation to continuously evolve its own structure. Authority is embedded in roles, not people, meaning individuals are empowered to lead without waiting for permission.
Real-life example: Buurtzorg
Developed by Gerard Endenburg in the 1970s, Sociocracy creates psychologically safe environments through consent-based decision-making. Rather than requiring majority votes or full consensus, decisions proceed when no member raises a reasoned objection. Interconnected circles linked through double-linking ensure alignment without centralised control.
Real-life example: Patagonia
Frederic Laloux’s research identified over fifty organisations operating with what he calls Teal-level consciousness, built on three pillars: self-management, wholeness (inviting people to bring their full selves to work), and evolutionary purpose (viewing the organisation as a living entity that adapts naturally). His work aligns with research demonstrating that intrinsic motivation and autonomy drive both performance and well-being.
Real-life example: Semco
Developed by Isaac Getz, the Liberated Company (Entreprise Libérée) does not prescribe a formal methodology or governance system. It is fundamentally about leadership transformation and a cultural shift: leaders must abandon command-and-control thinking and trust in the intelligence, potential, and self-management capacity of their people.
Top research converges on a clear finding: role-based organisations outperform traditional hierarchies across critical dimensions, when implemented with appropriate supportive structures.
Organisations can function successfully without any middle management when working substitutes are found for all tasks traditionally performed by managers. The key structural substitutes include autonomous self-managing teams, purpose-built ICT systems, internal coaching, and clear role definitions. It is not hierarchy per se that drives performance, but a clear structure.
Flatter role-based designs enable faster decision-making, greater innovation, and stronger talent retention, provided three critical design mismatches are avoided (see Conditions for Success below).
A rigorous empirical study of a German logistics enterprise transitioning to self-management, using social network analysis, found that after the transition, communication became less dependent on formal hierarchy and information flowed more freely across the organisation. Decisions could be made by those with relevant information, regardless of formal rank.
An important nuance: employees who held higher rank before the change still retained higher communication centrality, demonstrating that cultural and behavioural change must accompany structural redesign.
The well-being case is among the strongest in the literature. Martela established that self-managing organisations are structurally designed to satisfy basic psychological needs for autonomy and competence. His 2022 study further found that self-management produces a more egalitarian and democratic workplace, enhanced empowerment, increased work engagement, and reduced burnout.
Role-based structures address the root cause of workforce disengagement: lack of autonomy, unclear purpose, and limited growth opportunities.
Formal design choices shape emergent organisational behaviour, identifying three key levers: role delineation, sensemaking, and sorting/selection. A critical insight: role delineation is a primary mechanism through which organisational performance is shaped—but its effects depend on who fills the roles and the culture in which they operate.
Well-designed roles inhabited by well-selected individuals produce positive emergent behaviour—innovation, collaboration, and engagement.
A thorough analysis of a large-scale role-based organisation examined Buurtzorg’s 14,000+ employees across 900+ self-managing teams. According to a KPMG study commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Health, Buurtzorg achieves overhead costs of 8% vs. the industry average of 25%, uses fewer care hours per client while delivering better health outcomes, and maintains client satisfaction consistently among the highest in the sector.
A powerful insight from the research is that the choice is not between hierarchy and its absence, but between hierarchy and adequate non-hierarchical structure.
The most consistent finding across all eight studies: effective role-based organisations are not characterised by the absence of structure. Clear role definitions, transparent information systems, peer coordination mechanisms, and shared purpose replace the coordinating function of traditional middle management. Buurtzorg’s success with 900+ teams demonstrates this is achievable at scale.
A multi-contingency framework establishes that no single organisational form is universally optimal. Role-based designs excel in knowledge-intensive, complex, rapidly changing environments. For highly standardised, routine work, more structured approaches may be preferable. Reitzig identifies three specific design mismatches:
Research demonstrates that role design alone is insufficient. Who fills the roles, and the cultural context they operate in, are equally important. Selection processes must prioritise self-direction, collaboration, and comfort with ambiguity. Cultural norms around peer accountability, constructive conflict, and shared learning must be actively cultivated.
Research also provides important cautionary evidence. Studying a public sector addiction rehabilitation centre, a study identified three types of experience: positive (increased collective responsibility, enhanced well-being, greater efficiency), challenging (navigating ambiguity, managing peer accountability), and impossible (inter-team conflict and disidentification that made work untenable).
The conclusion: role-based designs require robust conflict resolution mechanisms and explicit inter-team coordination, without reverting to traditional hierarchical control.
Purpose-built information and communication technology are identified as a critical structural enabler of role-based organisations.
The key, Martela argues, is deconstructing the role of middle management into discrete functions and finding alternative solutions to each, through delegating some to teams, through IT solutions, and through various structures and practices. In his words:
“Autonomous, motivated and empowered teams combined with dedicated IT solutions to help them coordinate inter-team and inter-unit dependencies appears to be the secret behind most examples of self-managing organizations.”
The Buurtzorg case study (Martela & Nandram, 2025) provides the most detailed evidence. Buurtzorg’s purpose-built platform, BuurtzorgWeb, provides nurses with instant access to patient information, work schedules, and performance data, replacing the information-intermediary function of managers with direct data access.
The platform also serves as the main channel through which nurses communicate and share best practices, functions typically performed by middle managers in traditional organisations.
Administrative activities that existed mainly to satisfy managerial control or reporting layers were simplified and embedded directly in the digital platform, contributing to Buurtzorg’s 8% overhead cost versus the industry average of 25%.
Real-world examples illustrate how role-based governance works in practice, bringing to life the key success factors identified by the research presented in the previous section.
Welser Profile, a 356-year-old Austrian steel manufacturer with over 2,400 employees across Austria, Germany, and the USA, is among the most striking examples of role-based transformation in heavy industry. Founded in 1664 and processing steel for 11 generations, the company recognised in 2018 that 20th-century management methods no longer suited the dynamic complexity of the 21st century. Departmental silos were undermining alignment and agility.
Rather than adopting Holacracy wholesale, Welser created a hybrid model—the Welser Organisational System (WelserOS)—combining the best elements of Holacracy’s circles, roles, and governance meetings with structures tailored to their industrial context. Over 60 workshops engaged management and workforce in defining values worth preserving while designing how collaboration should work in the era of digitalisation and globalisation. The results have been remarkable: Welser doubled revenue from approximately €500 million to €1 billion in five years, with teams now working toward shared purpose, greater transparency, and significantly more agile decision-making.
Welser’s approach demonstrates that the effectiveness of role-based designs depends on fit between structure, strategy, technology, and people. Welser assessed its context—heavy industry, multi-generational culture, global operations—and crafted a custom-tailored design rather than adopting any single framework wholesale. They chose Talkspirit as their digital platform, rolling out to 800 active users with plans to extend access to all 2,000+ employees.
Insights from experts
Transforming an organisation’s governance is one of the most consequential decisions a leadership team can make. As the research throughout this whitepaper demonstrates, redesigning the organisational structure is only part of the journey. Lasting success depends equally on cultural transformation, effective conflict resolution, leadership development, and the right supporting infrastructure.
While technology provides the foundation for making roles, governance, and collaboration visible, successful transformation also requires experienced guidance. Talkspirit’s network of expert partner consultancies brings the human expertise needed to help organisations design, implement, and continuously evolve role-based ways of working.
PTHR's work with enterprises has shown that shifting from jobs to roles is a useful step, but not the end of the journey towards flourishing states of being for both people and their organisation.
Many role-based models still carry the DNA of traditional structures. They clarify work, but don’t always enable it to evolve. In complex environments, that becomes the constraint. Their approach, through an advanced operating model for HR (HR 3.0) and their most recent work on Polymorphic Organisations, focuses on designing systems where work, skills, and contribution can continuously reconfigure.
In practice, they see three shifts make the difference:
This is where their concepts of Spaces, Proficiency Stacks, and Flywheels come into play as a Polymorphic (shape-shifting and holding multiple logics) Organisation comes into play helping them organise around value creation rather than static design.
Role and skills-based models only deliver real impact when they sit within a system designed for movement. Otherwise, roles risk becoming the new job descriptions: clearer, and a little more dynamic, but still limiting. The organisations making this shift successfully are not just redesigning roles. The ask of the time we are in now and headed towards is to reconfigure and redesign how work itself flows.
“Role-based organisation is a reliable way to solve several of today’s challenges — from employee engagement to work effectiveness and the integration of AI.”
In a management consulting firm, everyone holds both client-facing roles tied to our engagements and internal roles: business development, HR, management, work on our business model, and so on.
Mapping our organisational objects and then letting each person place themselves on the circles they had an appetite for allowed us to uncover entire areas of activity that were uncovered because they had never been identified, and others that were failing because they were held by unmotivated or poorly trained colleagues. Our work organisation and our recruitment plan were transformed as a result.
Since then, the fluidity of work and the satisfaction of both employees and clients have improved significantly and durably.
How Talkspirit Supports Role-Based Organisations
Talkspirit is Europe’s leading platform for organisational governance, collaboration, and communication. A modular platform, it integrates with your existing tech stack and provides the strategic infrastructure that enables role-based governance to become part of everyday work. Whether an organisation adopts Holacracy, Sociocracy, the principles of the Liberated Company, a hybrid approach, or its own evolving operating model, Talkspirit adapts to support the organisation’s unique way of working.
Talkspirit’s platform architecture directly addresses each condition identified by top research, starting with the structural clarity that role-based organisations need to operate at scale.
Talkspirit does not impose a governance model. The platform natively supports the unique context of each organisation:
This flexibility reflects a core design principle: the right structure depends on your context. Talkspirit enables organisations to craft custom-tailored designs, whether fully decentralised, or hybrid.
Role-based organisations depend on structured governance processes. Talkspirit provides the infrastructure to make these efficient and accessible:
Inter-team conflict was identified as the greatest risk. Talkspirit addresses this through transparency:
Talkspirit modules integrate organisational clarity with the collaboration tools teams need every day:
For decades, organisations have managed their strategy in one place and their daily work in another. Organisational structures have lived in static charts, spreadsheets, or HR systems. Governance decisions have been made behind closed doors and buried in meeting minutes that few people ever revisit. Meanwhile, collaboration platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Notion have become the digital workplace, despite having little understanding of the organisations they are meant to support.
The result is a persistent disconnect. People collaborate without a shared understanding of who is responsible for what, who has the authority to make which decisions, or how work is actually organised. Communication flows, but organisational clarity does not.
Talkspirit was built on a different conviction: the strategy and the work itself should live in the same system. When roles, circles, governance, and decision records are integrated with messaging, meetings, projects, documents, and knowledge sharing, organisational clarity becomes part of everyday work instead of something documented elsewhere.
In this environment, context is never separated from action. Conversations within a circle are anchored in its purpose, roles, and accountabilities. Governance decisions become immediately visible to everyone they affect. Organisational changes are reflected where work happens, eliminating the gap between how the organisation is designed and how it actually operates.
This convergence of governance, collaboration, and communication is what sets Talkspirit apart. Collaboration platforms connect people but have no understanding of organisational design. Knowledge platforms organise information but not authority or decision-making. Traditional HR systems describe reporting lines but play little role in the work people do every day. Talkspirit brings these dimensions together in a single European platform, transforming the organisation itself into a living operating system, where structure, decisions, and collaboration evolve together in real time.
The evidence is clear: when implemented well, role-based organisations consistently outperform traditional hierarchies in decision-making speed, adaptability, engagement, innovation, and operational performance. Success, however, depends on clear roles, supportive technology, an enabling culture, and disciplined coordination.
Role-based governance is not the absence of structure or leadership. It is a different way of organising work, distributing authority, and enabling better decisions. Talkspirit supports this model by bringing governance, collaboration, and communication together in a single Organisational Operating System, where organisational design becomes part of everyday work.
Ultimately, role-based organisations are not flatter but clearer. That clarity enables greater adaptability, resilience, and collective intelligence, creating a lasting competitive advantage in the AI era.
Discover how Talkspirit can help your organisation gain clarity.
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