Innovating Executive Management in Self-Managed Organizations: A Radical Swedish Experience

Book chapter, 2023

This chapter explores how new logic replaces power that associates with executive work in a managerial hierarchy. Following a collaborative research tradition, we conducted a case study of a Swedish company, Qamcom Research Technology, a 20-year-old firm within the Qamcom Group, which has a record of continuous growth through innovation. Results suggest that executive management itself can be innovated to enhance creativity and innovativeness of the firm. We explore the company’s organizational model based on roles and self-organization, finding a novel logic that operates across four concepts—willingness to share power, a dynamic steering model, natural hierarchies, and true transparency. These concepts jointly extend innovation capability research and encourage rethinking the role that organizational democracy and hierarchy play in self-managed organizations to explain far-reaching self-management of executive work.