How We Got Here
- Jackson Elliott
- May 18
- 6 min read
The org chart was never designed for your best work.
That is a documented fact, not a complaint.
Most people who work inside large organizations eventually develop a quiet suspicion: the structure is not set up for them to do their best work. That suspicion is well-founded. It is also backed by 100 years of documented history.
The modern corporate structure did not come from business. It came from the military.
A peer-reviewed Cambridge University Press paper traces the origins of hierarchical corporate administration directly to the U.S. Army, which developed the principal-agent coordination systems that American railroads would later adopt, not the other way around. The mechanisms historians attributed to 19th-century railway entrepreneurs were developed first by officer-bureaucrats in the first iteration of the Department of War.
Frederick Winslow Taylor took those mechanisms and formalized them. His system scientific management became the direct foundation of most 20th-century corporate structure. It was adopted simultaneously by the U.S. military and American industry in the early 1900s, and the design logic was specific: the hierarchy was not a tool for coordination. It was an instrument of control.
Thinking was reserved for the upper levels of hierarchy; doing was assigned to the lower ones.
Max Weber then codified it. His formalization of bureaucracy, formal chains of authority, rational division of labor, governance by stable explicit rules was built on the same Taylorist foundation. Peer-reviewed research on the transfer of military culture to private sector organizations confirms what that inheritance carried with it: a structure explicitly designed to minimize uncertainty from below, not engage with it. In a military context, that design goal makes sense. On a modern battlefield, unauthorized improvisation costs lives.
In a business context where uncertainty is constant, creativity is the competitive advantage, and conditions change faster than any chain of command can process that same design goal produces something different. It produces organizations that are not built to learn.
Fear Is Not a Bug. For Some Organizations, It's the Point.
Wharton Management Professor Andrew Carton put it plainly: when the constant message in a culture is be afraid, the organization is not getting the most from its people. Fear stifles creativity, inhibits collaboration, produces burnout, and most importantly, prevents the kind of learning that makes organizations resilient over time.
Harvard's Amy Edmondson found a particularly telling version of this in hospital settings: employees operating under a culture of fear reported fewer errors than those working in psychologically safe environments not because fewer errors occurred, but because employees were too afraid to surface them. Fear does not improve performance. It suppresses the signal that something needs to be fixed.
A 2022 peer-reviewed Rutgers study reviewing over 70 studies involving 391,000 employees found that dysfunctional behaviors spread virally through organizations, and that fear-based leadership was the primary transmission mechanism. One-third of corporate managers are still leading through fear right now. Nearly 60% of workers report that fear has a measurable effect on how their teams communicate.
Research on power distance, the degree to which employees accept that power is unequally distributed and unquestionable shows what that fear produces operationally: employees who follow authority without exercising judgment, avoid responsibility, and generate errors through blind compliance rather than through carelessness. Four cross-cultural studies confirmed that fear of authority is the key mechanism. It does not produce better decisions. It produces decisions that protect the hierarchy while the work suffers.
Conformity Is Not Cultural Accident. It Is Structural Output.
In 1951, psychologist Solomon Asch ran a series of experiments that produced one of the most replicated findings in social psychology: people will publicly abandon objectively correct answers to align with a group's incorrect consensus. The pressure to belong, and to avoid social rejection, overrides trust in one's own perception. Asch found that conformity rates increased when tasks became more ambiguous which describes the overwhelming majority of organizational decisions.
Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments confirmed something more disturbing: ordinary people, placed inside a hierarchical structure with a legitimate authority figure, gradual escalation, and diffused personal responsibility, will carry out harm they would never choose independently. Milgram called the mechanism the agentic state the psychological condition where people experience themselves as instruments of another's will rather than autonomous agents. The participants did not transform into different people. The structure transformed their behavior.
A 2025 synthesis of conformity research confirmed the organizational application: economic incentives and hierarchical structures produce upward compliance, conformity that serves those at the top, not the work. Cultures that reward conformity do not produce better decisions. They produce decisions that are more comfortable for the people in power and more costly for the organization when conditions change.
This is the structural inheritance most organizations are still running on. Understanding it is not pessimism. It is the prerequisite for building something different. The organizations that have built differently, and there are real ones, at scale, with decades of data did not start by trying to fix culture. They started by changing the structural conditions that culture runs on.
That is what this series is about.
Next: The Current State: What the data actually looks like right now, and why the numbers haven't changed in 30 years.
References
5. The Influence of Hierarchical Bureaucracy and Bottom-Up Learning ... - This research aims to explore how hierarchical bureaucracy affects organizational performance in mil...
6. [PDF] The Transfer of Military Culture to Private Sector Organizations - In this conceptual study, we analyze the military culture of the DOD using the. Organizational Cultu...
7. Measuring the influence of perceived organizational support ... - PMC - In this study, Turner (38) found that employee empowerment initiatives are less effective in highly ...
8. Flattening the organizational structure: Encouraging empowerment or reinforcing control? - Flattening the organizational structure: Encouraging empowerment or reinforcing control? - Author: G...
9. Power Distance Belief and Workplace Communication - PMC - NIH - This research provides insight into the mechanisms that explain the relationship between power dista...
10. Does Fear Motivate Workers? - Wharton Magazine - Research shows that as tools for motivating workers, fear and intimidation come with a lot of risk; ...
11. [PDF] Worry at work: How organizational culture promotes anxiety - Drawing on existing models of stress. (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908), we elucidate how anxiety at different...
12. Unraveling a Culture of Fear to Help Reduce Workplace Anxiety - Rising levels of depression, stress, and burnout demand leadership that embraces wellness, leading w...
13. How Dysfunction Spreads Through a Workplace | Rutgers University - Dysfunction is highly contagious. Two Rutgers-led studies examine how counterproductive behaviors an...
14. Asch Conformity Line Experiment - Simply Psychology - Solomon Asch experimented with investigating the extent to which social pressure from a majority gro...
15. The Asch Experiment: A Classic Study on Conformity - These experiments focused on the extent to which social pressure could influence a person to conform...
16. Asch Conformity Experiment: What Teachers Should Know - This research explores when and why individuals resist conformity pressure, offering strategies for ...
17. Obeying and Resisting Malevolent Orders - We did not need Milgram's research to inform us that people have a propensity to obey authority; wha...
19. Milgram Experiment: Authority & Ethics in the Classroom - How Milgram’s obedience study shapes student understanding of authority, ethics, and conformity. Pra...
20. [PDF] Duality of Conformity in Modern Society: Mechanisms ... - SciTePress - The paper looks at how conformity manifests and the mechanisms through which conformity operates - i...
21. Learned Helplessness in AI-Assisted Work: When Users Stop Trying ... - Technology Trends ... I have observed a version of learned helplessness through my research with ent...
22. Digital Friction and Learned Helplessness in the Modern Workplace - Digital Friction cripples productivity, but continued learned helplessness leads to stagnation. We a...
23. Stop Learned Helplessness, caused by Digital Friction @ Work - When systems are confusing, workflows fragmented, and processes riddled with friction, employees oft...
24. Illusion of Competence and Skill Degradation in Artificial Intelligence ... - Psychologically, AI dependency fosters learned helplessness and anxiety, eroding users' belief in th...
25. [PDF] Managing Creative Tension Between Data-Driven and Intuition ... - This study examines managing creative tension between data-driven and intuition-driven decision-maki...
27. Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization - Shoshana Zuboff, 2022 - Surveillance capitalism is what happened when US democracy stood down. Two decades later, it fails a...
29. Algorithmic Attention and Content Creation on Social Media Platforms - We study the revenue-maximizing allocation of attention on an ad-funded social media platform govern...
30. The Attention Economy - Center for Humane Technology - Degrading Physical & Mental Health: Social media use has been shown to contribute to stress, lonelin...
31. The "Majority Illusion" in Social Networks - PMC - NIH - This effect, which we call the “majority illusion,” leads individuals to systematically overestimate...
32. The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy - For example, a 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 64% of Americans believed social media had...
33. Through the Newsfeed Glass: Rethinking Filter Bubbles and Echo ... - In this paper, we will re-elaborate the notions of filter bubble and of echo chamber by considering ...