self managed

Was reading this:-

Take the September 24-30 issue of The Economist. Page 76, opened at random, offers some startling statistics about how companies work inside. According to a study commissioned by Dov Seidman, author of "How," 43% of American employees surveyed say their company works on a command-and-control culture–management by coercion. Another 54% say their employers are top-down, but with a dollop of carrots and sticks, and talented leaders who try to inspire followership–a category Seidman calls "informed acquiescence." Only 3% actually practice employee self-governance, where a shared set of values and principles guide employees in their work and align them with the company’s larger purpose.

The Economist goes on to report that, unlike the employees in the belly of the beast, the bosses at the tops of companies who were interviewed saw a very different picture. Bosses, according to the study, are 8 times more likely than the average to say that their company is self-governing. 27% of the bosses say their employees are inspired by the company–only 4% of the employees see it that way. 41% of the bosses say their company rewards performance based on values, rather than purely on financial results–14% of the employees agree.

What does the gap cost companies?

What I am not clear is how to actually “practice employee self-governance”. Sometime back while attending Agile Project Management, I heard about “self-managed teams” and “situational leadership” – rather than leadership through assigned authority, people from the team who are best suited for a job picks up a task or a challenge and leads the team to manage that particular situation. I can imagine this working out for a startup or an open source project etc. I am very curious on how to make it work in our kind of environment. Keeping apart all that is not within our control, it would be an interesting experiment. Like in a project if the tasks are open for all to see and people picks up tasks to do, like the collaboration tool being talked about here.