Hierarchy produces results in teams

Peter Drucker's 1987 prediction that business would become modeled like a symphony is not coming through. Although there has been a significant shift towards increased use of teams, in organizations hierarchy still pervades. Using literature and case study reviews, we demonstrate why hierarchy is not only an inescapable part of a team's organizational design and operation, but it can also positively affect the team's results. Hierarchy is compatible with the basic structure of most teams. The use of hierarchy within the functional operations of a team assists it to run cross-organizational, cross-functional projects with distributed teams spanning different continents. The ultimate hierarchical organization, the military, has learned to 'flip' their approach to hierarchy by taking advantage to better use field level experience at the operational level. The findings will enable organizations to more effectively create and utilize teams.