As a leftist with anarchist leanings, I have thought for a long time about the purpose of social hierarchies in humans. It is clear that humans have deference to authority as one of universal values, why is that?
There is a sort of standard ("right-wing", "evolutionary") explanation that argues that social hierarchies are of biological nature, similar to hierarchies in some species, they are related to sexual selection and simply somebody has to be an "alpha". Ultimately, I rejected this explanation because I think the evidence for it is contested. Some humans are actively willing to submit, it's not just the threat of violence that causes them to do so, and the deference to authority is not always sexual in humans. It seems that not all hierarchies are simply a struggle for power, although arguably in large-scale human groups, it often becomes the case.
Currently, my favorite explanation of authority as a natural human value comes from the idea that the authorities represent "institutional memory" of the particular human group. So for example, the first authority you meet, your parents, exists to give you knowledge and experience of their life, so you wouldn't learn from zero as a child. Similar goes for the social group as a whole, the authorities in the group (typically the elders) are the people who lean conservative, and make sure that lessons of the past are remembered by the group.
Given this explanation for the role of social hierarchies and authority, I am not sure what replaces this "institutional memory" in "leaderless" organizations. If nothing replaces it, it must become inefficient eventually by repeating past mistakes. Or the leaderlessness might be short-lived and the authority which holds the institutional memory will appear.
However, I agree that in modern large companies, the management is often turned over much more frequently than some employees. This, assuming the actual role of hierarchy in human groups is to gatekeep institutional memory, would explain why some conclude that management is useless. But it is not clear whether going further and entirely removing it is going to be better.
Something I find interesting about the French Revolution is how slowly the commoners came to seriously consider alternatives to the default system of rule, despite sustained loss-of-credibility by the elites. This seems to fit with your /institutional memory/ model.
> But it is not clear whether going further
> and entirely removing it is going to be better.
There is room to distinguish strategic leadership and middle-management. Strategic leadership sets coherent direction for an institution, and continues to be relevant. Middle management is a vestige of the industrial era, where manpower and scale were interchangeable concepts.
The orchestras show that there is an alternative to middle-management. We don't really have a word for this, but we could call it Elders.
A key difference between Elders and Middle Managers is the role of skills. Elders must be at least competent at domain-relevant skills to be relevant, and their respect grows with skill mastery. Whereas, in a MM culture, having skills excludes you from influence. You are either a career manager (entirely without domain skills), or you convert. In the process of conversion, you will have social pressure applied not to get your hands dirty.
The advantages of social hierarchies seem straightforward to me:
1) Tree structure minimalizes communication complexity. It minimalizes both latency and total cost of communication/decision process, which has usefulness for both business and military. Efficient decision process allows quick and decisive power control, which often has superlinear advantages. The other side of coin is that longer and more thorough decision process could lead to better decisions, which may have long-term advantages.
2) Social hierarchies are not cause of struggle for power, but they ritualize and tame it. With that, they limit costs associated with struggle for power in a similar way how ritualized animal fights limits wounds, which would happen in real fights. In social hierarchy each actor acknowledges its level of power and allows surrender without destruction. Ideally, the power struggle within rules of social hierarchy also makes it more meritocratic (e.g., people with better business skills get on higher level in bussines hierchies).
But your institutional memory makes also sense.
I personally struggle with it, as i have strong emotional aversion to both submit or claim power over others, but it is not hard to see advantages (and also disadvantages) of social hierarchies on rational level.
BTW, looking on your nick, aren't you by chance JS1 from abclinuxu?
These are good hypotheses, but I personally don't think either of them explains very well why humans value hierarchies.
Ad 1, when there is no central "brain", and decisions are more distributed, a single hierarchy often hinders communication. (There are for example studies that show that the biggest communication barrier in SW teams is not a physical distance, but a managerial one.) It seems when people work in a distributed way they tend to communicate in many different ad hoc groups, as needed.
Ad 2, there is indeed some evidence that more centralized societies are less violent. But it's not clear whether this is because of the hierarchy, or because of the concentration of power. On the other hand, it seems that the societies with multiple different hierarchies like democracies are in fact often less violent than more authoritarian societies. It seems to me if this hypothesis was true, we would see much more formalized ways how the hierarchies are changed, but I think we don't, rebellions are often a very messy business. Perhaps it can be accepted as an explanation why there are trade wars instead of wars, but as the answer to the original question, it IMHO still leaves something to be desired.
In any case, I think there are many good explanations for hierarchies.
Animals have hierarchies, too. Humans are different by having two types of hierarchies: dominance (based on strength, powered by fear) and prestige (based on skills, powered by admiration).
In childhood, parents play both roles: they punish you for disobeying rules, and they care about you and teach you all kinds of stuff. They exceed you in both strength and skills. But later, these two things separate: there are people you fear but don't admire, and people you admire but don't fear; people whose attention you want to avoid, and people whose attention you dream about.
In the workplace, there are people whom you admire for their skills, and then there are people who are simply given power over you without doing anything admirable. And there are also a few people who are given the power and who use it in an admirable way. I guess the idea is that we should get rid of people who are given power but do not have natural respect. The people who have both the power and respect... dunno, maybe their power should become informal, based on the consent of the governed (i.e. you follow their advice, because their advice consistently turns out to be good). Thus the bearers of "institutional memory" would stay, and the useless ones would go. Some teams would have one authority person, other teams would have multiple authorities with different responsibilities based on their skills.
There is a sort of standard ("right-wing", "evolutionary") explanation that argues that social hierarchies are of biological nature, similar to hierarchies in some species, they are related to sexual selection and simply somebody has to be an "alpha". Ultimately, I rejected this explanation because I think the evidence for it is contested. Some humans are actively willing to submit, it's not just the threat of violence that causes them to do so, and the deference to authority is not always sexual in humans. It seems that not all hierarchies are simply a struggle for power, although arguably in large-scale human groups, it often becomes the case.
Currently, my favorite explanation of authority as a natural human value comes from the idea that the authorities represent "institutional memory" of the particular human group. So for example, the first authority you meet, your parents, exists to give you knowledge and experience of their life, so you wouldn't learn from zero as a child. Similar goes for the social group as a whole, the authorities in the group (typically the elders) are the people who lean conservative, and make sure that lessons of the past are remembered by the group.
Given this explanation for the role of social hierarchies and authority, I am not sure what replaces this "institutional memory" in "leaderless" organizations. If nothing replaces it, it must become inefficient eventually by repeating past mistakes. Or the leaderlessness might be short-lived and the authority which holds the institutional memory will appear.
However, I agree that in modern large companies, the management is often turned over much more frequently than some employees. This, assuming the actual role of hierarchy in human groups is to gatekeep institutional memory, would explain why some conclude that management is useless. But it is not clear whether going further and entirely removing it is going to be better.