The Internet: 'Don't Mail Me, I'll Mail You'

Remember the non-hierarchical workplace? Internet companies made the idea fashionable a few years back: no titles, no offices and even a lowly assistant can challenge the decisions of the chief executive officer. Many management gurus predicted the death of the pecking order. But maybe we really want hierarchy so much that if it doesn't exist, we'll create it--and cyberspace, it turns out, is the perfect place. David Owens, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has studied 30,000 e-mail messages--four years' worth--at a California technology firm. Since top dogs couldn't signify their status with a lofty title or a corner office, they telegraphed it with short, terse, carelessly misspelled e-mails. They also followed the "don't mail me, I'll mail you" rule, waiting longer to return the e-mail of underlings, or not responding at all. The message: my time is valuable, and so am I. By contrast, middle managers and junior employees spent hours laboring over longer e-mails, crafting complex arguments and making sure to throw in plenty of jargon to impress the higher-ups. Instead of staying late at the office, they stayed up all night in cyberspace, firing off e-mails time-stamped "2 a.m." The most desperately obsequious employees even resorted to using emotive symbols like the smiley face-- :-) --to curry favor.

The lesson is plain: unbridled democracy in the office often doesn't work. In other studies at the same firm, Owens and his researchers discovered that nonhierarchical structures led not to greater teamwork but to more hero worship of star employees. And anyway, since there were no mechanisms in place to define and validate the work of all employees, the lowly assistants actually didn't get to have their say. Instead, attention went to the most aggressive and vocal employees, who found it easier to monopolize meetings. "Success wasn't about the collective but, rather, about a cult of personality," says Owens. Looks like the pecking order isn't so bad after all.