Why Horizontal Organizations Don’t Fall Flat: Organizational Structure Shapes Perceptions of Egalitarianism and Company Warmth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In recent years, a growing number of companies have evolved toward relatively “flat” management structures with minimal hierarchical layers of management. Some even leverage this flatness as a key marketing message and defining element of corporate identity. Although organizational structure has been studied extensively throughout various disciplines, its influence on consumer response has received little attention. This research reveals that a company’s organizational structure can shape consumer perceptions of and subsequent responses to the company. All else being equal, perceived organizational flatness (vs. tallness) tends to induce more positive consumer reactions, such as increased purchase amounts, advertising engagement, purchase intentions, crowdfunding contributions, and brand choice. This phenomenon occurs because consumers infer that flatter companies foster relational egalitarianism, which in turn enhances perceived company warmth. However, the positive effect of perceived flatness is not universal. It is eliminated or reversed among people with a lower preference for egalitarianism and those with conservative political ideologies. This work enriches our understanding of how a company’s organizational attributes, which are usually regarded as beyond the consumer’s purview, may shape consumer perceptions of the company, offering insights for businesses as they embrace new ways of communicating and promoting themselves to consumers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".