The structural explanation
One substantial line of explanation locates the cause in the structural changes growth itself requires. Larry Greiner’s research on organisational growth, published in Harvard Business Review and reissued as an HBR Classic, describes growth as a sequence of phases, each resolved by a practice that becomes the constraint of the next — creativity giving way to a crisis of leadership, delegation giving way to a crisis of control, and so on. A person who joined during an earlier, less formalised phase — when their judgement was the process, when decisions moved at the speed of a direct conversation rather than a structured approval chain — experiences the arrival of formal structure not as an improvement but as a loss of exactly the conditions that made their early contribution possible and satisfying.
This explanation is well supported by Greiner’s broader argument that what resolves one growth crisis becomes, almost mechanically, a constraint at the next stage. The structure that a growing organisation needs to add — clearer reporting lines, more formal approval processes, more specialised roles — is not optional; it is usually a genuine and necessary response to the coordination demands of a larger organisation. The explanation’s implication, though, is that this necessary structure has a real and predictable cost: some of the people whose contribution depended on the earlier, less structured environment will find the new one measurably less suited to how they work, through no failure of leadership intent and no flaw in the structure itself.
The autonomy explanation
A second, distinct line of explanation centres less on structural phase transitions and more on decision rights specifically. Research by Paul Rogers and Marcia W. Blenko, both then partners at Bain & Company, surveyed executives at more than 350 global companies for Harvard Business Review and found that only around 15% reported having an organisation that helps the business outperform its competitors — a finding rooted substantially in unclear decision ownership. Their research identified four recurring bottlenecks where decision-making stalls as organisations scale: global versus local, centre versus business unit, function versus function, and inside versus outside partners.
Applied to why high performers leave, this line of explanation points toward something more specific than general structural change: growth frequently redistributes decision rights away from the individual who previously held them, often without a clear or well-communicated account of where those rights have gone instead. A person accustomed to deciding something directly may find, as the organisation grows, that the same decision now requires input, sign-off or coordination across a boundary that did not previously exist — not necessarily because their judgement is trusted less, but because the organisation’s own decision architecture has become more distributed as a structural consequence of scale. For a high performer whose sense of contribution is closely tied to autonomous decision-making, this redistribution can feel like a demotion in substance even where no formal demotion in title or compensation has occurred.
Why the disagreement persists
These two explanations are not mutually exclusive, and most researchers working in this area would likely accept that both mechanisms operate simultaneously in many real departures. The disagreement in emphasis persists partly because the two bodies of research were built to answer somewhat different questions: Greiner’s framework is about organisational evolution broadly, across every function and level, while Rogers and Blenko’s research is specifically about decision rights and where they stall. A departure that looks, from the structural-phase view, like a natural casualty of an organisation outgrowing its earlier informality can look, from the decision-rights view, like a specific and potentially avoidable failure to redesign who decides what as the organisation scaled.
The practical difficulty this creates for a leadership team is that the two explanations imply different diagnostic questions, even though neither implies a specific fix. The structural-phase explanation asks whether this departure was a predictable, largely unavoidable consequence of the organisation moving through a growth transition that every organisation of comparable trajectory tends to move through. The decision-rights explanation asks a narrower and more checkable question: specifically, which decisions did this person previously hold that they no longer clearly hold, and was that redistribution deliberate and communicated, or an unplanned byproduct of growth that nobody explicitly decided?
A further complication is that the two explanations can produce the same visible departure through different internal experiences that look similar from the outside. A person leaving because the organisation has simply become a different kind of place to work — the structural-phase story — often describes their departure in general terms: the culture changed, it doesn’t feel like the place I joined. A person leaving primarily because specific decisions were quietly redistributed away from them — the decision-rights story — often describes their departure in more concrete terms, even if the underlying frustration took a similar amount of time to build: I used to decide X, and now that goes through someone else. The language used in an exit conversation, where one is available, may be one of the few practical signals that distinguishes which explanation is doing more of the work in a given case, though even this is an imperfect test, since a person leaving for the decision-rights reason may still reach for the more general, less confrontational language of “it doesn’t feel the same” when the conversation is not one they expect to be acted on.
A third, smaller complicating factor deserves mention even though neither body of research addresses it directly: external market conditions. A high performer’s departure during a growth period may coincide with a moment when their skills happen to be in unusually high demand elsewhere, for reasons entirely unrelated to anything happening inside the organisation. Attributing every departure to internal structural or decision-rights causes risks overlooking this simpler, external possibility — and a leadership team that never considers it may end up making internal changes in response to a pattern that was, in a given case, substantially driven by conditions outside the organisation altogether.
It is also worth noting what neither explanation implies: that departures of this kind are always preventable, or that every instance represents an organisational failure. Some attrition during a growth period is, according to both bodies of research, a close to structural inevitability rather than evidence that leadership handled the transition poorly. The value in distinguishing the two explanations is not that either one, once identified, guarantees a different outcome for the specific person who has already decided to leave — it is that a pattern of departures, examined honestly against both explanations rather than one, gives a leadership team a more accurate picture of which lever, if either, is worth adjusting for the people who have not yet decided.
What it means for a leader
Should every departure of a strong performer during a growth period be treated as a decision-rights failure? Not necessarily. The research suggests two distinct and independently plausible mechanisms, and treating every departure through only one lens risks misreading cases that are better explained by the other. The more useful discipline is checking both explanations against the specific case rather than defaulting to either.
Is it possible to tell, in a specific instance, which explanation applies? Not always cleanly, and the research reviewed here does not offer a reliable test to separate them in every case. A departure conversation that surfaces specifics about what decisions the person felt they had lost, as distinct from a general sense of the organisation “feeling different,” may point more toward the decision-rights explanation than the broader structural-phase one.
Does this mean growth inevitably costs an organisation some of its early high performers? The structural-phase research suggests some attrition of this kind is a plausible, recurring pattern across many organisations that have gone through comparable growth transitions, rather than a sign of unique failure in any one case — though the decision-rights research suggests that at least part of the cost may be more specifically tied to how deliberately decision rights were reallocated, which is a narrower and more examinable question than the broader structural pattern alone.
Looking for your own sector? The Other Sectors page points to the closest match.
Questions worth considering
- Looking at the last few departures of strong performers during growth, how much of each could be traced to a change in structure, and how much to a loss of control over decisions?
- Was the way decision rights were reallocated as the organisation grew a deliberate choice, or a by-product of scale?
- Which of those who have not yet decided to leave would find the organisation’s current shape harder to work in than the one they joined?
This perspective is part of Performance.
Your team is facing similar challenges?
Subscribe to The Riddle Ledger
Perspectives are sent as they are published, with no promotional email, and you can unsubscribe at any time.