Middle managers play a crucial role in decision-making, coordination, change management, and leadership in organizations. Decentralized organizations with little to no hierarchy, however, challenge the necessity of having managers as the cornerstone of organizing. In this case study, we focus on a Finnish IT services company, Reaktor, with 500 + employees but no traditional chain-of-command middle managerial layers. Synthesizing existing literature and drawing especially from functional leadership theory, we identify ten task-oriented, people-oriented, and systems-oriented managerial functions that middle managers typically fulfil to keep organizations operational. We then proceed to examine our case using an abductive, qualitative inquiry, investigating how our case company fulfils these functions without having traditional middle managers. The organization was built around autonomous self-managing teams with substantive authority and independence. However, we discovered that the teams were not able to take care of all managerial functions, and thus the fulfilment of these functions required purpose-built supportive structures, including a number of supportive managerial roles, such as coaches, client managers, and a salary team, each having one narrow slice of the authority a typical middle manager would have. Our investigation thus identifies decentralized functional substitutes for middle managers, while offering a new way of understanding how decentralized organizations lacking traditional chains of command remain coordinated.
Strategic leaders shape organizations. Besides decisions on strategic direction, growth ambitions, or cost structure, their choice of organizational design lays the foundation for company performance. Although organizational design has been widely studied, work linking strategic leadership to organizational design remains dispersed across multiple perspectives, limiting cumulative understanding of this relationship. In this systematic literature review, we synthesize existing research on how strategic leaders and their specific characteristics impact organizational design, how organizational design influences strategic leaders and their behavior, and how firm- and environmental-level characteristics condition these relationships. We identify the key mechanisms underlying the observed relationships, clarify how different theoretical perspectives explain them, and highlight where existing research provides only limited accounts. Building on this synthesis, we develop an integrative framework that clarifies the current state of research including directionality and mechanisms across theoretical perspectives. Lastly, we propose an extensive and forward-looking research agenda offering conceptual scaffolding and novel research ideas for advancing scholarly work in this field.
Artificial intelligence is commonly viewed as a technology for automation, task augmentation, or the substitution of human labor. This paper argues that its more fundamental organizational significance lies in changing how organizations create and allocate cognitive work. Building on classical information-processing theory and contemporary organization design research, the paper conceptualizes AI as a synthetic cognitive layer: a persistent, non-human information-processing capability embedded within executive work that expands cognitive capacity while leaving judgment, authority, and accountability with human executives. The paper argues that AI introduces a new organizational design variable by enabling organizations to allocate selected cognitive activities to artificial cognitive agents. This extends organization design theory by identifying a new mechanism for creating information-processing capacity, partially decoupling such capacity from hierarchical layering and traditional administrative support. Building on recent work that examined AI as a holder of formal managerial authority, the paper complements this perspective by analyzing AI as part of the executive’s cognitive architecture rather than the formal hierarchy. The paper introduces the concept of the synthetic cognitive layer, examines its implications for executive support and organizational design, and proposes six executive capabilities for governing AI-enabled cognitive systems. By reframing AI as a structural design variable rather than a technological tool, the paper expands the theoretical design space of organizations and establishes a foundation for future research on hybrid human–AI cognitive architectures.
Amid ongoing pressures for efficiency, accountability, and equity in health service governance, this longitudinal case study examined the five‑year impacts of a centralized allied health structure in a large public hospital setting. Building on earlier findings that demonstrated short‑term improvements in governance clarity, workforce flexibility, and professional identity, the five‑year follow‑up explored whether these benefits were sustained and what new challenges emerged as the model matured. Qualitative data were collected from 169 allied health professionals (25
